This book explores various forms of cultural influence and exchange between Britain and the Nordic countries in the late eighteenth century and romantic period. Broadly new-historicist in approach, but drawing also on influential descriptions of genre, discipline, mediation, cultural exchange, and comparative methodologies, these essays not only constitute a substantial and innovative contribution to scholarly understanding of the development of romanticisms and romantic nationalisms in Britain and the Nordic countries, but also describe a pattern of cultural encounter which was predicated upon exchange and a sense of commonality rather than upon the perception of difference or alterity which has so often been discerned by critical descriptions of British romantic-period engagements with non-British cultures. The volume ought to appeal to a broad and genuinely international academic audience with interests in eighteenth-century and romantic-period culture in Britain and Scandinavia aswell as to undergraduates taking courses in eighteenth-century, romantic, and Scandinavian studies.

Cian Duffy is Professor of English Literature at Lund University, Sweden. He has published articles, books and editions dealing with various aspects of the intellectual life and cultural history of late eighteenth-century and Romantic-period Britain.

1. Introduction.- Chapter 2. 'Imaginary circles round the human mind: bias and openness in Mary WollstonecraftsLetters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796) - Christoph Bode.- Chapter 3. From enlightened expectations to romantic fulfilment: British travellers visiting Finland - Leena Eilittä.- Chapter 4. Constructing and classifying the North: Linnaeus in Lapland - Annika Lindskog.- Chapter 5. Inventing Jutland for the Golden Age: Danish artists guided by Sir Walter Scott - Gertrud Oelsner.- Chapter 6. The dance all under the greenwood tree: British and Danish romantic-period adaptations of two Danish elf ballads - Lis Møller.- Chapter 7. The North and the East: the Odin migration theory in the eighteenth century and romantic periods - Robert Rix.- Chapter 8. These children of nature: cultural exchange in nineteenth-century Danish imaginings of Greenland - LoneKølle Martinsen.- Chapter 9. Locating Norway in the North: the cultural geography of Norway in Stricklands Arthur Ridley; or A Voyage to Norway (1826) and Andersens Elverhøi (1845) - Elettra Carbone.- Chapter 10.  A remote and cheerless possession: early nineteenth-century British imaginings of Newfoundland - Pam Perkins.- Chapter 11. Coda: Comparing the literature of the North: William Wordsworth and Jens Baggesen - Cian Duffy.- Bibliography.-