Journal Title: International Journal of Humanities and Cultural Studies (IJHCS) - Year 2015, Vol 2, Issue 3
Abstract
Gender politics is at the heart of what crime novelist Hakan Nesser called ‘the strange genre of Nordic Noir’ (quoted in Foreshaw 2012: Preface), a contemporary body of writings with historical roots in a heavy political subtext that betrays a wider dissatisfaction with both the demise of the welfare state and the ideal of post-war utopianism in contemporary Scandinavia. Steig Larsson's The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (2005) quickly became regarded as a key example of the emerging new genre of Nordic Noir and one of the biggest global publishing phenomena of the twenty-first century. As a result of its popular female protagonist, Lisbeth Salander and section headings featuring damning statistical data about male violence against women in Sweden, the novel has been celebrated as a vessel for Larsson’s ‘deep feminist sympathies’ (Whitelaw 2010). Challenging claims that the novel offers a vision of female empowerment, this article instead suggests that Larsson uses his first fiction, and the wider Millennium Trilogy of which it is a part, to create and cull female characters using the men who ‘hate’ them as representations of the competing tensions between masculinity and violence in the new genre of Nordic Noir. Nordic Noir is the product of claustrophobia, of small countries in the midst of population crises, frustrated at a lack of safety promised in the post-war years and experiencing a growing lack of faith in the authorities governing them. This article suggests that beneath popular imaginaries of seemingly peaceful and equal societies, Nordic Noir exposes violent masculine authority as an expression of the relationship between the individual and the neoliberal state in the twenty-first century.
Authors and Affiliations
Katy Shaw| Leeds Beckett University, UK
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP17381
- DOI -
- Views 117
- Downloads 1
This article is based on the assumption that the analysis of literary discourse from pragmatic perspectives takes into consideration the specificity of the literary work. The literary work under focus is Oscar Wilde’...
The aim of the present paper is to present a model for agility culture in university and achieving as much as possible agility in Islamic Azad University in today’s changing world by addressing following questions:...
Walker Percy, who describes in his novels the modern malaise of the twentieth century that causes an undefinable anxiety for the individual, examines what it means for the individual to exist. The problematization of t...
Elite are the main factor of every country's development and progress. As the other countries, In Iran also, they play the remarkable role in country’s development and advancement, so that different policies approved...
The main objective of this paper is to question intertextuality, as one literary discourse device, in the New York Times Op-Eds addressing Muslims inside and outside of the United States. The researcher argues that the...