Author : Dimitrios Kassis
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781443816823
Total Pages : 110 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (168 download)
Book Synopsis American Travellers in Scandinavia by : Dimitrios Kassis
Download or read book American Travellers in Scandinavia written by Dimitrios Kassis and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 110 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The emergence of the racial theories of Nordicism and Anglo-Saxonism at the threshold of the twentieth century changed the cultural and political mapping of the world, and gave a new impetus to the construction of national discourses both in Europe and overseas. In its complex situation as a former colony and a rising empire, America strove to forge a new identity based on the biological findings of fresh scientific fields, the so-called pseudosciences. In their travel texts, American travel writers wished to revive their ties with the Old Norse world, embarking on trips which aimed to link the discovery of Vinland, by the Vikings, with the nineteenth-century rediscovery of the Old Norse culture, by Victorian and American scholars. This book explores American perceptions of the Nordic countries which contributed to the construction of the nineteenth-century American national identity. The concepts of Nordic unity and the Americanisation of Northern Europe, in response to the increasing immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, are connected to American travellers parallel attempt to reflect upon the Nordic societies from a utopian perspective.