‘Girl Interrupting’: History and Art as Clairvoyance in the Fiction of Vigdís Grímsdóttir

ABSTRACT: The year 1980 marks a distinctive change and exciting renewal in the general development of post-war Icelandic fiction. An obsessive preoccupation with rural nostalgia and urban malaise gradually gives way to a decidedly anti-realist fiction which celebrates the wonders of everyday day life in the city. The term magical realism is often used in this context, and indeed, there can be little doubt that the Icelandic translation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1978 constituted an important influence on writers during this period. One contemporary Icelandic author who has made striking use of magical realist strategies to dislodge the current impulses of modernity in Icelandic culture and disrupt imposed ways of perceiving reality is Vigdís Grímsdóttir. The aim of this article is to discuss the innovative ways in which Vigdís has used Icelandic story-telling and folklore traditions, preserved and passed down mostly by women, to reaffirm, from a female perspective, a localised cultural imagination within a contemporary globalised Icelandic urban context

Soldiers and Other Monsters: the Allied Occupation in Icelandic Fiction

ABSTRACT: Wars and arms long remained a foreign phenomenon in Iceland until the country was occupied by Allied forces during WWII. Although the occupation was a “friendly” one and the army brought unprecedented wealth to the country, the presence of a foreign military was objectionable and distressing to many. Literature, historiography, and scholarship on the occupation have long been obsessed with the so-called ástandskonan (woman fraternizing with soldiers), the perceived incarnation of an invaded and polluted nation. This article examines the response of Icelandic fiction writers to the occupation through the figure of the soldier instead. A focus on fictional representations of the soldier enables us to see how writers imagine the occupation and its consequences for the nation, its culture, and, not least, for an injured sense of manhood