Books published by Stockholm University Press

The aim of this book is to investigate the taking and giving of hostages in peace processes during the Viking Age and early Middle Ages in Scandinavia and adjacent areas. Scandinavia has been absent in previous research about hostages from the perspectives of legal and social history, which has mostly focused on Antiquity (the Roman Empire), Continental Germanic cultures, such as the Merovingian realm, and Anglo-Saxon England.The examples presented are from confrontations between Scandinavians and other peoples in which the hostage giving and taking was displayed as a ritual act and thus became symbolically important. Hostages were a vital part of the peace processes and used as resources by both sides in the ‘areas of communication’ within the ‘areas of confrontation’. Literary texts as well as runic inscriptions, picture stones, place names, and personal names are used as source material.

The authors of the present volume, Myth, Materiality, and Lived Religion, focus on the material dimension of Old Norse mythology and the role played by myths in everyday life. More broadly expressed, the collection looks at the social, ceremonial and material contexts of myths. This topic has been underexplored in previous research on Old Norse myths, despite its important theoretical implications. However, discussions around materiality, in a more general sense, have for a long time been signifi cant for historians of religion, especially archaeologists. Myth, Materiality, and Lived Religion seeks to make the case for the relevance of materiality to literary historians and philologists as well.Questions relating to the theme of materiality and lived religion are posed in this book, including: What do myths tell us about the material culture of the periods in which they were narrated? What role did myths or mythical beings play in connection to, for instance, illnesses and remedies during the Viking Period and the Middle Ages? How did ordinary people experience participation in a more formal sacrifi cial feast led by ritual specialists? The editors of this book are all associated with the Department of Ethnology, History of Religions and Genders Studies at Stockholm University, Sweden.

This book deals with two research fields and brings them together: contrastive linguistics and third language acquisition. The book describes the following linguistic structures in Dutch and Swedish from a contrastive perspective: spatial adverbs, copula, impersonal passives, impersonal constructions and finally the posture verbs stand, zit and lie. Dutch and Swedish are usually acquired as a third language and not as a second language, which implies that learners already comprehend various other languages. When learning a language these multilingual learners have developed certain strategies which draw on their competence in earlier studied languages. In the process of learning a third language, metalinguistic and cross-linguistic awareness play an important role. Comparing linguistic structures in two closely related languages as Dutch and Swedish can enhance cross-linguistic awareness and therefore be used as a didactic tool.

At the beginning of the 1960s, Swedish researchers started a sociological study of all children born in Stockholm in 1953, Project Metropolitan. This book describes the project's at times dramatic history, where issues of personal integrity and the role of social sciences were heavily debated. These discussions were fueled by the rapid and far-reaching digitalization in society at large and also within social sciences. As such, Project Metropolitan came to symbolize the benefits and potential risks related to an expanding body of research based on large groups of individuals and multiple register data sources.At the outset, the project's founders sought to answer the following question: "Why do some get on better in life than others?" One of the main aims of the project was to study the long-term impact of conditions in childhood. The book therefore also includes an updated presentation of the main findings, as they have been conveyed in over 160 publications to date. These publications cover a wide array of topics and phenomena such as social mobility and education, substance abuse and crime, health and ill-health, peer influences and family relations, and adult lives of adopted children.Today Project Metropolitan is known as the "Stockholm Birth Cohort Multigenerational Study (SBC Multigen)" and is still in full vigor. From its original group of 15,000 children, the study has become multi-generational by adding data about their parents, siblings, children, nieces and nephews. As they approach their late 60s, it will also be possible to follow these "children" into retirement and old-age.In the concluding chapter the author discusses some of the challenges contemporary social research is facing. What are the current threats to academic freedom and what opportunities do the unique data registers in countries like Sweden provide?Sten-Åke Stenberg is professor of sociology at the Swedish Institute for Social Research at Stockholm University. He has worked with Project Metropolitan for several decades. He has also been part of the study since he was born in 1953.

The book studies the genesis of the institutions of the Francophonie at the time of independence of African countries in the sixties. Based on geopolitical analysis and postcolonial theories, the author reassesses the position of France which officially distanced itself from this multilateral organization. France controlled more and more the organization in the 1980s when the organization increased its political expression on international issues. By confronting the spirit of the structures with the actors of the Francophonie, the work reflects on the challenges and the difficulty to define the specific fields of action of this organization.This book is in French: L¿ouvrage se propose de revenir sur la génèse des institutions de la Francophonie au moment des indépendances des pays africains dans les années 1960. En s¿appuyant sur une analyse géopolitique et sur les théories postcoloniales, l¿auteur réévalue le positionnement de la France qui officiellement prend ses distances avec cette organisation multilatérale pour mieux la contrôler dans les années 1980 lorsque la Francophonie augmente sa capacité politique à intervenir sur les grandes questions internationales. En confrontant l¿esprit des structures aux acteurs de la Francophonie, l¿ouvrage évalue les défis et la difficulté à cerner les domaines d¿action spécifiques de cette organisation.

Placing itself within the burgeoning field of world literary studies, the organising principle of this book is that of an open-ended dynamic, namely the cosmopolitan-vernacular exchange.As an adaptable comparative fulcrum for literary studies, the notion of the cosmopolian-vernacular exchange accommodates also highly localised literatures. In this way, it redresses what has repeatedly been identified as a weakness of the world literature paradigm, namely the onesided focus on literature that accumulates global prestige or makes it on the Euro-American book market.How has the vernacular been defined historically? How is it inflected by gender? How are the poles of the vernacular and the cosmopolitan distributed spatially or stylistically in literary narratives? How are cosmopolitan domains of literature incorporated in local literary communities? What are the effects of translation on the encoding of vernacular and cosmopolitan values?Ranging across a dozen languages and literature from five continents, these are some of the questions that the contributions attempt to address.

Anyone who studies the history of modern art-in art museums, in the classroom, in art historical handbooks or specialist surveys-will soon be aware of a certain recurrent pattern governing the selection of objects and forming a certain type of narrative where the history of modern art is presented as a variety of different -isms that dissolve into each other in the coherent sequence that constitutes the history of modern art as modernism.But why is this pattern so similar in all different places and contexts? Is it possible to distinguish between the history of modern art and the history of modernism? And if so, when, where and how did modernism become synonymous with art of the modern era?With a dual perspective-regarding art as well as the discursive perception of art-Modernism as an Institution attempts to answer these questions by studying the frameworks for the institutional establishment, as well as the historiography, of modern art.

The Power of the In-Between: Intermediality as a Tool for Aesthetic Analysis and Critical Reflection gathers fourteen individual case studies where intermedial issues-issues concerning that which takes place in between media-are explored in relation to a range of different cultural objects and contexts, different methodological approaches, and different disciplinary perspectives. The cases investigate the intermediality of such manifold objects and phenomena as contemporary installation art, twentieth-century geography books, renaissance sculpture, media theory, and public architecture of the 1970s. They also bring together scholars from the disciplines of art history, comparative literature, theatre studies, musicology, and the history of ideas.Starting out from an inclusive understanding of intermediality as "relations between media conventionally perceived as different," each author specifies and investigates "intermediality" in their own particular case; that is, each examines how it is inflected by particular objects, methods, and research questions. "Intermediality" thus serves both as a concept employed to cover an inclusive range of cultural objects, cultural contexts, methodological approaches, and so on, and as a concept to be modelled out by the particular cases it is brought to bear on. Rather than merely applying a predefined concept, the objectives are experimental. The authors explore the concept of intermediality as a malleable tool of research.This volume further makes a point of transgressing the divide between media history and semiotically and/or aesthetically oriented intermedial studies. The former concerns the specificity of media technologies and media interrelations in socially, politically, and epistemologically defined space and time, and the latter targets formal considerations of media objects and its various meaning-making elements. These two conventionally separated fields of research are integrated in order to produce a richer understanding of the analytical and historical, as well as the aesthetic and technological, conditions and possibilities of intermedial phenomena.

Anarchism and religion have historically had an uneasy relationship. Indeed, representatives of both sides have regularly insisted on the fundamental incompatibility of anarchist and religious ideas and practices. Yet, ever since the emergence of anarchism as an intellectual and political movement, a considerable number of religious anarchists have insisted that their religious tradition necessarily implies an anarchist political stance.Reflecting both a rise of interest in anarchist ideas and activism on the one hand, and the revival of religious ideas and movements in the political sphere on the other, this multi-volume collection examines congruities and contestations between the two from a diverse range of academic perspectives.The second volume of Essays in Anarchism & Religion includes essays covering themes such as Yiddish radicalism, Byzantine theology, First Peter, William Blake, the role of violence in anarchism and in Christian anarchism, Spanish anarchist-themed film, and the Occult features of anarchism.In a world where political ideas increasingly matter once more, and religion is an increasingly visible aspect of global political life, these essays offer scholarly analysis of overlooked activists, ideas and movements, and as such reveal the possibility of a powerful critique of contemporary global society.

In Platonic Occasions, Richard Begam and James Soderholm reflect upon a wide range of thinkers, writers and ideas from Plato, Descartes and Nietzsche to Shakespeare, the Romantics and the Moderns-from Evil, Love and Death to Art, Memory and Mimesis. The dialogues suggest that Percy Shelley was right when he claimed "We are all Greeks," and yet what have we learned about the initiatives of culture and literature since our classical predecessors? Begam and Soderholm's ten dialogues function as a series of dual-meditations that take Plato as an intellectual godfather while presenting a new form of dialogic knowledge based on the friction and frisson of two minds contending, inventing and improvising. The authors discuss not only what is healthy and vigorous about Western culture but also consider where that culture is in retreat, as they seek to understand the legacy of the Enlightenment and its relation to the contemporary moment. Platonic Occasions is an experiment in criticism that enjoins the reader to imagine what the dialogic imagination can do when inspired by Platonic inquiry, but not bound by a single master and the singular mind. Beyond Socratic maieutics and Cartesian meditation is a form of intellectual interplay where it is impossible not to be of two minds.

This collection of essays investigates elements of the human voice and performance, and their implications for gender and sexuality. The chapters address affect, pleasure, and memory in the enjoyment of musical and theatrical performance. Rosenberg also examines contemporary feminist performance, anti-racist interventions, activist aesthetics, and political agency especially with regard to feminist and queer interpretations of opera and theatre. She contextualizes her work within broader developments in gender and queer studies, and within the feminist movement by highlighting important contributions of artists who draw from the above to create performance. The book will be welcomed by opera and theatre lovers, students, academics, and the wider public that is interested in the performing arts and its queer feminist potential.

In the two centuries since Mozart's La clemenza di Tito was first performed, and the almost three centuries since Metastasio created the libretto, many rumours, myths and prejudiced opinions have gathered around the work, creating a narrative that Mozart, Mazzolà and their contemporaries would scarcely recognise.The essays in this book contribute ideas, facts and images that will draw the twenty-first century reader closer to the events of Central Europe in the late eighteenth century, and these new facts and ideas will help peel off some of the transmitted accretions that may hinder a modern listener from enjoying and understanding the opera in all its fullness. In this sense the essays present the reappraisal promised in the title.The book is a product of the Performing Premodernity research project, funded by the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences and based at the department of theatre studies of Stockholm University. Envisioned and edited by Magnus Tessing Schneider and Ruth Tatlow, the five essays by internationally renowned Mozart scholars are preceded by a chronology and a selection of original documents presented in new and revised parallel translations.

Ce livre porte sur les relations culturelles entre la France et la Suède de 1945 à nos jours. Il réunit les articles présentés à l'occasion de la conférence internationale, Frankrike-Sverige - Tur och retur , qui a eu lieu à Stockholm en janvier 2014, organisée par l'Université Paris-Sorbonne et l'Université de Stockholm. Ces vingtdeux articles tracent ensemble une histoire croisée des médiations matérielles et immatérielles, dynamiques et complexes, ayant permis la construction des identités culturelles dans trois domaines principaux : les représentations et l'imaginaire ; la médiation et les vecteurs de transmission ; la traduction, la réception et la circulation des oeuvres.