This book is based on my PhD dissertation, entitled Representations of the Concept of “Americanness” in the Canon of Antebellum American Literature. It is a work in cultural history and literary theory that suggests a fresh and potentially fruitful approach to the old notion of Americanness, an idea that lay at the foundation of American studies in mid-twentieth century, only to be exposed as “ideological fiction” by the New Americanists. Surprisingly, neither its advocates nor its critics have made the scholarly effort necessary to theorize or conceptualize Americanness. 

The subtitle indicates what is distinctive about this project: this is a study of the concept of Americanness. Thus, following Reinhart Koselleck’s history of concepts (Begriffsgeschichte), I propose that “Americanness” is not an ordinary word, but a concept with a broad, albeit historically specific, semantic field. Thus, in the three decades before the Civil War, the semantic field of “Americanness” was constituted at the intersection of several concepts, in different stages of their respective histories; among these, nation, representation, individualism, sympathy, race, and womanhood. By tracing the representations of these concepts in literary texts of the antebellum era, paying attention to their overlapping with the rhetoric of national identification, I uncover some of the meaning of “Americanness” in that period. 

As far as literary history writing is concerned, Begriffsgeschichte has a double potential: first, to explain the source of confusion between historically different semantic loads of the same concept and, second, to check the critic’s tendency to relativize concepts and therefore make the past a little too familiar. The concept-focused close reading of literary works of the past involves a reformulation of the text/context binary so as to account for contingencies without diminishing the importance of exegesis (a crippling tendency in contemporary literary studies); ultimately, this work aims to reconsider the relationship between history and literature.

To lay out the meaning of “Americanness” I analyze a wide range of antebellum texts by Emerson, Melville, Thoreau, Douglass, Whitman, Stowe, Jacobs, Hawthorne, Poe, and Fuller, against the background of critical reception and recent scholarship. Thus, to college students and faculty, this book offers a period study of major American writers of the antebellum era.

In this volume, twelve Sweden-based researchers reflect on the phenomenon and concept of populism in relation to democracy and the humanities from the multiple vantage points of various disciplinary backgrounds: philosophy, history of ideas, media and communication, journalism, political science, gender studies, organization science, education theory, popular culture, and literary studies. While the study of populism has attracted a lot of attention in political science, this topic has been rarely explored by scholars in the humanities. Rather than contribute to the already established area of populism studies in social and political sciences, our authors take a more open and exploratory stance through which they attempt to open up new fields and directions for inquiry from an interdisciplinary humanistic perspective.

Social policy in the field of child “defectivicy” during the war and the first years of Soviet power formation (1914-1920) was performed in conditions of the severe socio-political disaster. Multimilliondemographic losses of the future human resources in forms of bad health children, a high rate of child mortality, potentially not born children in the future decades etc. – are standing in the line with the other facts of the war-revolutionary circumstances of the historical period in focus. Analysis of the texts of the number of historical documents, which are relevant to the dominant political and scientific areas in this field, allowed to identify the essence of the social doctrine of the country of Soviets and its role in understanding the key actors of a new social policy in the field of “defective” childhood. The definition of child “defectivicy” got a rather wide interpretation. Among the traditional understanding of “defective/ sick child”, a new category of "defective” children has appeared – they were disadvantaged and homeless/street children and teens. Philanthropic and private forms of social care of “defective/sick” children, supported by the social policy of the Russian Empire, were nationalized. Instead those “new institutions” were established: the first prototypes of the soviet internat institutions (schools communes for morally-defective). Traditionally “defective/sick” and “new defective” children and teens were united in the “single army of morally-defective”. A new social doctrine of the country of Soviets, expressed by the principle of socialistic humanism, in practice (by different reasons), didn’t protect the right of the most socially vulnerable group of children to become full members of the new society. A scientific discourse of “care taking” appeared inside Curative pedagogy and Pedology. Defectology, took the place of scientific philanthropy and established the foundation of the scientific knowledge about “defective” children, becoming a crucial regulator of social political discussions of "care taking" about them during upcoming decades of the Soviet era.

Hur kommuniceras och omförhandlas olika normer om passande klädstil för äldre kvinnor? 21 kvinnor i åldrarna 62-94 år har intervjuats om vardag, kropp, åldrande och kläder. Plagg i garderoben har varit materiell ingång för intervjuerna. Flera intervjupersoner menade att man idag är friare att klä sig som man vill än man var förr. Men åldern hade ändå betydelse för vilka kläder kvinnorna valde. De tyckte att det hade blivit svårare att köpa kläder då utbudet vänder sig till en yngre målgrupp. Kroppen hade förändrats över åren, vilket nödvändiggjorde stiländringar. Likaså hade man en annan vardag och andra behov som äldre vilket också återspeglades i garderoben. En del intervjuade uttryckte osäkerhet om vilken klädstil som passade – och var passande – för dem som äldre. Här blev mediernas ”görom-mig reportage” en referenspunkt. Kvinnorna ville inte se tantiga ut, men visa acceptans för sin ålder och klä sig ”vuxet”

This essay is a study of a dialogue between science and religion at the John Templeton foundation. The aim has been to investigate the value of this specific dialogue and also to get an understanding of the value of dialogues between science and religion in general regarding actuality and fruitfulness for the participants, the audience and the public debate. The study of the Templeton dialogue revealed shortcomings regarding definitions and guidelines, choice of participants and of topic. Furthermore, the argumentation was based on the individual participants belief or non-belief rather than their professional competence areas. The different contributions to the dialogue did not show any higher degree of fresh ideas, apart from two short essays describing new definitions of God. These thoughts were, however, not brought to the debates that were also a part of the dialogue. Despite the shortcomings, where many should have been possible to avoid, the studied dialogue showed willingness from people of different perspectives to meet and the dialogue also gained an interest from the general public. The conclusion of this study is that with clear definitions and guidelines and a well-considered choice of topic, the dialogue between science and religion should have a future.

In the context of Western, European, Nordic, and Swedish radical nationalism, this study is an analysis of the various ways the political party the Sweden Democrats talks about religion; primarily about Swedish Evangelical-Lutheran Christianity and the Church of Sweden.

The study investigates the party expressions on religion and nationalism, using theoretical models of interpretation, constructed for this specific purpose, out of hermeneutic methodology.

The purpose has been to analyse the different functions of the various ways the Sweden Democrats talk about religion, and to investigate how the references to religion legitimize the ideology of nationalism, with the aim to answer the following questions:

• How do the Sweden Democrats’ talk on religion function as an identity marker?
• In what way is it possible to distinguish an aspiration for cultural purity in the Sweden Democrats’ talk on religion?
• Is it possible to distinguish neo-racism in the Sweden Democrats’ talk on religion?
• In which ways can the Sweden Democrats’ talk on religion be regarded as political strategy?

The results demonstrate in which ways the Sweden Democrats apply religion to promote the party perceptions of nationalism, as well as to legitimize the party conceptions of the Swedish nation and the Swedish people:

• Swedish Christianity and the Church of Sweden are used to identify Swedish culture and to identify contrasting foreign culture.
• Swedish Christianity is used as the determining factor between the good Swedish people and the bad other people.
• Swedish Christianity is used as the determining factor between the right Swedish values and the wrong values of the other.
• Swedish Christian values are used as dividing criteria between the culturally pure Swedish people and the culturally impure other people.
• The degeneration of the Church of Sweden mirrors the degeneration of the Swedish society.
• Swedish Christian homogeneity will guarantee security for the Swedish people and the Swedish nation within the Swedish nation-state.
• Elements of religion and culture sort different peoples into different categories in the hierarchical view of humanity.
• Swedish Christianity and Swedish culture identify and define the Swedish people as innocent to the current precarious situation of the Swedish nation, and Swedish Christianity and Swedish culture identify and define the people of the other, which is to blame for this situation.
• The Swedish people is superior, to the non-Swedish people, because of superior Swedish religion and superior Swedish culture.
• Swedish Christianity is used to promote anti-democratic political positions.
• Swedish Christianity is used to legitimize coercion and force in the enforcement of Swedishness.

"Att skriva, det måste säkerligen tjäna till något. Men till vad? Dessa små krångliga tecken som kliver framåt av sig själva, som täcker det vita papperet, som vilar på de plana ytorna, som betecknar tankens gång. De gnager. De rättar till. De karikerar. Jag tycker mycket om dem, dessa härar av rundlar och punkter. Något av mig lever i dem."

Orden är den franske författaren Jean Marie Gustave le Clézios i essän "Att skriva" (i samlingen "Jordisk extas", i översättning av Eva Alexandersson, 1969).