Bestsellers – a research field for literary, cultural and gender-related
studies with a national and international perspective.
Lars Handesten
University of Southern Denmark
Abstract
This article explores some aspects of the phenomenon of the fiction bestseller in Denmark, and thus
deals with a literature that is largely neglected by literary research. Initially, it defines some
essential features and functions of the bestseller. The bestseller is not merely a mirror of its time but
offers a vision of a new order of life as well. The sensational story of Yahya Hassan’s poetry
collection Yahya Hassan (2013) shows how a modern bestseller can emerge and operate and how
even poetry is able to set a political agenda. Two other examples of the bestseller’s ideological
importance are the contribution of women’s literature to the formation of a female self-awareness
over the last 30-40 years, and how bestsellers have served as a forum for moral education and
political debate. Finally, the article examines the relationship between the local and the exotic in
bestselling literature and combines a national and an international perspective.
Keywords
Literary sociology, bestsellers, genre, gender studies, local and global literature, cultural history
Research into bestsellers
The bestseller is looked down on by literati and writers in Denmark.i There is broad agreement that
quantity and quality are basically diametrically opposed to each other and, until the converse is
proved, a bestseller is artistically disqualified, because in order to appeal to a wide audience it has
to be mainstream and therefore aesthetically uninteresting. For there is something fundamentally
suspicious about books and authors that sell well. If Danish writers also start to sell abroad in large
numbers, the whole thing becomes even more suspect.ii Authors such as Peter Høeg and Jens
Christian Grøndahl have both been subject to harsh criticism after making their international
breakthrough. iii Criticism of their works can of course be aesthetically justified, but it ranges far
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more widely than that, often also including criticism of the environments the writers describe and
the attitudes to which the novels gives expression. Without more ado, the author is criticised as a
person, with everything from physical appearance to clothing being mixed into the critique. And
then the books are even criticised for their audience. There is widespread disdain for middle-aged
female readers from the middle class, who make up the largest reading audience. Whatever they
read cannot possibly be any good. When it comes to the assessment of bestsellers and their authors,
criticism is often far-removed from literary ideals about sticking to the text. iv
If one takes a look at the bestseller lists over the years, some of these prejudices have been put
to shame. For it is noteworthy that some of the best-selling Danish writers are also regarded as
being key authors by the literary establishment and are included in traditional literary histories.
Benny Andersen and Kirsten Thorup, for example, are both highly regarded writers in the
circulation of special literature and popular literature.v Benny Andersen is even a lyric poet, but also
a musician and a sort of national poet. Their names confound the subtle distinction between highbrow and low-brow literature, and disprove the prejudice that quality and quantity cannot go hand
in hand.
A bestseller is of course a broad concept, one that initially is solely defined on the basis of
quantitative criteria. Determining such quantities, however, is not all that simple. Publishers only
issues sales figures sporadically, and the number of books sold in supermarkets is kept secret for
reasons of competition. This leaves the bestseller lists, drawn up by bookshop chains with their own
interests, which does not make them all that reliable.vi These lists can, however, be used with a
certain degree of caution and judiciousness as indicators of what has sold well over a period of
time. But they are not based on absolute figures for the total Danish market, and it is meaningless to
compile one’s own statistics with them as one’s point of departure.
Criticism of bestsellers deals, among other things, with the so-called bestsellerism that are
becoming increasingly influential in the book market. In a market where the book is competing
sharply with other media, there has been a tendency towards larger and fewer publishing firms, and
for these firms to be less interested in cultivating literary diversity and quality literature than in
earning money from bestsellers. The Danish market is no longer controlled by fixed book prices,
and supermarkets and Internet trading cater for large segments of the sale of bestsellers.vii This
means that smaller bookshops have to close down, and that those remaining have to concentrate on
the titles that sell well. Which in turn means that there is less room for the narrow quality literature
segment, which public libraries also do not buy as many copies as previously.viii Libraries are also
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subject to quantitative criteria, since their success is measured by the number of users and books
borrowed, and not on what they have standing on the shelves.ix So they naturally also choose to
concentrate on bestsellers.
Connected to the disqualification of the bestseller en bloc is the fact that it has not been a
particularly widespread subject for literary research. The disdain of the material has also led to a
lack of research into it, especially when it comes to recent and highly topical literature. Or, to be
more precise: Research has not been interested in popular literature with Danish names such as Jane
Aamund, Helle Stangerup and Hanne-Vibeke Holst or in such foreign names as Jean M. Auel,
Régine Deforges and Dan Brown, whereas the popular crime novel has attracted particular attention
over the past few decades.x Literary research has been preoccupied with what one could call the
aesthetically relevant, and when research has dealt with authors who have sold well, it has not been
in the light of the popularity of the authors in question. Researchers have written about Jens
Christian Grøndahl, Carsten Jensen and Morten Sabroe, for example, but not because they appeal to
a large audience.xi It is narrow literature and classics that have been richly represented in both
research and teaching at Danish universities, and there has been a broad consensus about which
works are to be included in this canon. If one compares three recent presentations of Danish
literature – Danske digtere i det 20. århundrede (Danish writers in the 20th century, 2000-02),
Hovedsporet (The Main Track, 2005) and Dansk litteraturs historie 1960-2000 (The history of
Danish literature 1960-2000, 2007), there is no difference in names worth mentioning.
Recent literary tendencies and methods have not changed this consensus much. It is obvious
that new-criticism critics and deconstructive readings have sought that which is aesthetically
refined, but it is on the other hand more difficult to understand that queer and post-colonial readings
as well as new historicism and book history have also failed to deal with contemporary bestseller
literature. This, however, has partly to do with tradition. For while a certain conservatism reigns
within literary studies as regards the material, this does not apply to the recent media science, which
is not bound by tradition. Here one is just as happy to analyse bottom-rung TV series as one is
complex works by Lars von Trier. Within comparative literary history, the ideologically motivated
studies of pulp fiction and popular literature are merely a parenthesis. Since then, attempts have
been made to open up third-world literature, as David Damrosch (2003), among others, has
suggested – and as post-colonial research has also done. But this still does not have anything
particularly to do with the literature that sells in large quantities on a worldwide market. Both
national and global bestsellers are, however, worth investigating – if not for their aesthetic value,
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then at least for their contribution to a history of mentality and their ideological importance, as the
following will illustrate. xii
Very few researchers since the 1970s and 1980s have done much about the sociology and
psychology of literature that would be able to tell us something about bestsellers. It is even so
possible to point to a few exceptions that have played a role – major or minor – in Danish literary
research. One could mention J.A. Appleyard: Becoming a Reader (1994) and, to an even greater
extent, Peter Brooks: Reading for the Plot (1984), both of which are psychologically based, as well
as Antony Giddens: Modernity and Self-Identity. Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (1991)
and Pierre Bourdieu: The Rules of Art. Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (1996), both of
which are based on social history. In passing, one could also mention Janice A. Radway: A Feeling
for Books. The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire, which adopts a
personal, social-historical and anthropological angle on the subject. Finally, Franco Moretti, in
Graphs, Maps, Trees. Abstract Models for a Literary History (2005), has proposed alternative,
quantitatively based ways of carrying out contemporary literary history, but this has not as yet
resulted in much. His concept of ‘distant reading’ though could potentially set things in motion as
regards the bestsellers, of which only a very few merit a close reading, but which can help relate a
more general story of literature and its history.xiii In the Anglo-Saxon world, however, culture- and
literature-historical investigations have been carried out in bestseller literature by, for example, the
British researchers John Sutherland: Reading the Decades. Fifty Years of British History Through
the Nation’s Bestsellers (2002) and Clive Bloom: Bestsellers. Popular Fiction since 1900 (2002).
Furthermore, the American Michael Korda has written Making the List. A Cultural History of the
American Bestseller 1900-1999 (2001). All three can be used to throw Danish bestseller literature
into relief, since there are both similarities and dissimilarities between the bestseller literature of the
large countries written in the world-language of English and a smaller country such as Denmark
with a minority language.
In the following, I will carry out a number of probes into Danish bestseller literature, in which I
also include translated literature – but intend to limit myself to fiction.xiv By way of introduction, I
will define in general terms – and in continuation of John Sutherland (2002 and 2007) – what a
bestseller is and what functions it can have. Sutherland mentions that ‘Bestsellers fit their cultural
moment as neatly as a well-fitting glove. And, typically, no other moment.’xv This does not mean,
however, that the bestseller is merely a passive mirror of its age. It can also be a reaction to it and
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help set the agenda for its change. This is manifestly evident in the three ‘dips’ into bestsellers I
now intend to make.
My point of departure is the sensational story of the collection of poems Yahya Hassan (2013)
by Yahya Hassan, which makes clear in a unique way just how a modern bestseller can come into
being and function. After this, I will outline how bestseller literature has made a considerable
contribution to the formation of a female self-awareness over the past 30-40 years. Subsequently, I
will provide examples of how bestseller literature has functioned and continues to function as a
forum for moral and (gender-)political debate. And finally I wish to touch on the relation between
the local and the exotic in bestseller literature and thereby combine an international and national
perspective.
Forms and functions
A bestseller is first and foremost defined by its sales figures in relation to time. The number of sold
copies that is required to be able to speak of a bestseller depends on the size of the country and the
market, so the figure for Denmark is much lower than in large countries such as USA and UK. In
Denmark, it is only 10,000-15,000, although one has to graduate and speak of big bestsellers when
one tops the magical 100,000 mark. By international standards, one can speak of mega-bestsellers
when talking about J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, Dan Brown’s series with Robert Langdon in
the role of the unbeatable interpreter of symbols, or E.L. James’ erotic trilogy about Anastasia and
Christian Grey. So it is admittedly the figures that count, but it is extremely relative in what sense.
The relativity also becomes increasingly obvious when the time factor is added. The life-span of the
bestseller is weeks and months and in rare instances a couple of years, and a steadyseller such as the
Bible is therefore not in a real sense a bestseller. xvi
I started out by speaking of the bestseller as if it was a simple, fixed entity. One also speaks of
a bestseller as if it constituted a special genre, but there is no such thing. There are, on the other
hand, certain genres that sell better than others, and that one often finds on the bestseller lists. The
romance, family saga, historical novel, crime novel and thriller are recurring genres during most of
the 20th century, while a genre such as fantasy only really arrives in the last quarter of the 20th
century with J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings 1954-55 (Danish translation 1968-70) and more
recently with J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series (1997-2007). George R.R. Martin’s The Song of
Ice and Fire 1-5 1996-2011 (Danish translation 2011-13) and the Danish writer Lene Kaaberbøl’s
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Skammerens datter 1-4 (2001-03) (The Shamer Chronicles). The fantasy genre is thus represented
on the lists, while science fiction literature, generally speaking, remains a niche genre. The fairytale
genre, in a broad sense, plays a lesser role on the lists, which are dominated by the realistic mode,
which is broken from time to time by magical realism. Under the influence of literature from Latin
America, magical realism had its breakthrough in the 1980s with Isabel Allende, since where it has
features on the lists with such Danish and translated works as, for example, the Danish writer Peter
Høeg: Forestilling om det tyvende århundrede (The History of Danish Dreams, 1988) and most
recently the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami: Kafka på stranden (Kafka on the Beach, 2005). And
then there are all kinds of mixes and variations of genres that make it reasonable to speak of genre
in a ‘Derrida’ sense (Derrida 2003). Genre is rather something that a book contributes to and takes
part in than it is an unambiguous entity to which it belongs. The autobiographical wave of the past
years has also sown doubt as to whether, in certain cases, we are dealing with books that should be
included under fiction or non-fiction. It is hard to know, for example, if Karl Ove Knausgård’s Min
kamp (My Struggle, 2010-12) is to be placed under fiction or autobiography.
It is admittedly possible to speak of genre literature in the case of crime novels and family
sagas, but if one looks more closely at the individual work, things get more complicated. The crime
novel has also – especially the femi-crime novel – become a kind of realistic contemporary novel in
which the character grows older and develops, starts a family, gets children, gets divorced, etc.xvii
The genres develop – as Alistair Fowler (1982) has pointed out ‒ through time and must be seen in
their actual temporal context.
As with British and American lists, there are also only a few names that repeatedly crop up on
the Danish bestseller lists if one looks back over the past 35 years. In Denmark, one has been able
to see the one translated novel after the other by such writers as John le Carré, Fay Weldon, Ken
Follett and Jan Guillou, as well as such Danish names as Leif Davidsen, Benny Andersen, Kirsten
Thorup, Jane Aamund and Hanne-Vibeke Holst have featured on the lists with new works. The
tendency is clear: There are only a few, striking names that have a brand quality about them and go
on selling an increasingly large number of books.xviii
A superficial glance at the bestsellers is enough to show that a number of factors apply to books
that sell well. Generally speaking, they have to be in prose, even though there are a few, striking
examples of poetry selling well that I will return to. Stylistically, the bestseller lies within a
linguistic ‘normal area and rarely makes use of a modernist special language. The books can
perfectly well be long and in series, so that over a longer period one can familiarise oneself with a
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universe and follow the ‘ups and downs’ of its characters. The series that flourish within fantasy
literature, the crime novel and the thriller make it easy for the reader to ‘get into the book’, since the
characters and universe are known in advance. The repetitions reduce the level of complexity and
make it easier to read even long novels and complex plots. What is already known is combined with
a certain amount of variation, and precisely this repetition and recognisability created a secure
feeling in the reader, so that even the most horrific and grim sequences in the crime novel or thriller
are bearable. It is nerve-tingling, but not to the extent that it ruins one’s sleep at night. To use
Anthony Gidden’s concept, the repetition ensures an ‘ontological security’ that postmodern man,
who lives in a changing and unpredictable world, wishes for himself (Giddens 1991). J.A.
Appelyard (1994) formulates it as follows: ‘To repeat with variation is the ultimate security.’xix
The bestseller either has a topical theme or a topical angle on a historical motif. The subject
can, for example, be incest and paedophilia, which have been of special interest in the 00s (Kristian
Ditlev Jensen 2001, Erling Jepsen 2002, Kim Leine 2007). It can be love, which is subjected to a
gender debate in the 1980s and has a generation angle in the 00s, when a young generation breaks
away from the erotic emancipation and serial relationships that their parents’ generation
championed in the 1970s and 1980s (e.g. Meyer 2005 and Thorup 2003). As the extremely popular
historical novel shows, the motif does not have to be topical, as long as the angle is. When Umberto
Eco writes about life in a medieval monastery in Rosens navn (The Name of the Rose, 1984), this is
done with a postmodern awareness and a postmodern interpretative point that lie close to the 1984
reader.
The bestseller offers the reader the opportunity to be able to identify herself with the characters
of fiction. This can either be because the characters resemble the reader himself, or conversely
because they represent something the reader covets. The reader recognises herself as she is or as she
would like to be. The universe that the bestseller describes can similarly be something the reader
recognises from her diary but has perhaps been blind to and becomes aware of via the fiction. And
it can be something exotic. The bestseller can give an exotic experience which arises since the
reader is taken out of her usual world and placed somewhere else in time and/or space. So the
historical novel offers an exotic experience in the same way as the travel novels and migrant novels
of, among others, Salman Rushdie and Khaled Hosseini do.
Quite a lot of bestsellers contain the breaking of a taboo, which challenges and titillates the
reader. Often this is a taboo of a sexual nature (Deforges 1984 and James 2012), but it can also be a
religious one (Marstrand-Jørgensen 2009-10). The bestseller is welcome to provoke, as long as it
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does not become too shocking. The breaking of a taboo can be mollified by the humour that is also
typical of many bestsellers. It is a humour that tends more to be reconciliatory than ironically
uncompromising.
The bestseller arouses the reader and likes to evoke sympathy, indignation and erotic desire,
whereas it much more rarely permits unbridled anger. Although this can happen. When Lisbeth
Salander in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, like some avenging angel, takes the law into her
own hands and punishes and tortures her former tormentors, paying them back in kind, the reader it
allowed to enjoy this without suffering any feelings of guilt. The villains are portrayed as being so
evil that it justifies Salander’s breach of the law. The fact that she is basically no different from her
male opponents in her violence, and that the reader lives out the same fantasies of violence as them
does not detract from the pleasure one bit. The satanic urge is justified by the evil of ‘the others’.
The bestseller is entertaining, but it is also informative. The latter characteristic became
particularly obvious with the encyclopaedic tendency that Umberto Eco encouraged with Rosens
navn (The Name of the Rose), but it is also this with its presentation of environments from near and
far and with characters that initially are unfamiliar to the reader. Just as the novel in the 19th
century could – and according to the Danish critic Georg Brandes (1871) also should – ‘make
things the subject of debate’, it can also today function as a starting point of a debate about
individual and society and about a philosophy of life. It is consciousness-raising and identityforming – as I now intend to show in the following.
Martha C. Nussbaum (2001), who argues for the ethical dimension of literature, is of the
opinion that it is only the great classic works that can present qualified ethical challenges to readers.
But ethical reflection and development also take place in popular literature. Not perhaps at always
as high an intellectual and aesthetic level as that of Henry James, but it is nevertheless present, and
it is with this that the majority of readers comes into contact and to which they respond. Ethical
forming also takes place via popular literature, and an examination of which values it spreads and
what effect it has is well worth studying and discussing.xx It should not merely be brushed aside as
of lesser value, but taken particularly seriously since it has so wide a dissemination and – one must
assume – a correspondingly broad effect. What it perhaps does not possess in the way of lasting
aesthetic and cognitive quality it has in its mass effect now and here.
The bestseller lives and has lived beyond every modernist conception of what constitutes art.
As early as 1925, José Ortega Y Gasset wrote in his essay The Dehumanization of Art about modern
art and art appreciation. In it he describes how in a metaphorical sense it is not a question of looking
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through the window pane at reality outside, but of focusing on the glass itself – or, in other words,
on the form. Concerning the modern aesthetic attitude he writes: ‘Not only is grieving and rejoicing
at such human destinies as a work of art presents or narrates a very different thing from true artistic
pleasure but preoccupation with the human content of the work is in principle incompatible with
aesthetic enjoyment proper.’xxi
The bestseller and its readers are generally speaking not interested in the glass, but, on the other
hand, extremely preoccupied with the world and the human figures that appear through the glass.
Readers are not interested in evaluating the form, but very eager to discuss characters, action and
the issued present in the fictional work. A bestseller is precisely a book that people talk about. This
can be between readers, but also in the media. Discussion has a stimulating effect on sales, because
‘everyone’ now has to read the book to be able to join in the discussion of the book that ‘everyone
is talking about’.
Poetry sets the agenda
As mentioned, it is quite rare for a poetry collection to become a bestseller. It has, though, occurred
several times in Denmark for Danish poets. When the feminist struggle was at its height in the
1970s, Vita Andersen had her breakthrough with the debut collection Tryghedsnarkomaner
(Confidence Addicts, 1976), which sold extremely well and today has totalled over 100,000 copies.
These are confessional poems which, in a simple and direct language, tell of women’s disappointed
dreams of love and couplehood. The poems appealed directly to many women readers, provoking
the feminist movement with its portrayal of weak-egoed women who are unable to get their world
to function. Tryghedsnarkomaner caused considerable debate and was followed by many other
female writers’ poems. For it was inspiring and animating to be able to write so simply and directly
that everyone could take part.
That it was also possible to sell more complex and modernist influenced poems in Denmark
was demonstrated by the highly respected poet Søren Ulrik Thomsen (b. 1956). He broke through at
a mature age to a wider audience with his collection Rystet spejl (Shaken Mirror, 2011), which sold
more than 27,000 copies in the space of a couple of years. Topping the list, however, was the
‘national poet’ Benny Andersen, who with his Samlede digte (Collected Poems, 1998) reaches sales
figures of 150,000 copies over a period of ten years. Furthermore, a number of the poetry collection
included in Samlede digte had already been no. 1 on the bestseller lists and sold well. Andersen was
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able in a critical but loving and humorous way to provide pictures of Danes that they could both
laugh at and think about.
But a quite sensational and exception situation arose in autumn 2013, when the 18-year-old
stateless Palestinian Yahya Hassan, domiciled in Denmark, published his autobiographical poetry
collection Yahya Hassan (2013).xxii With his categorical denunciation of Islam, a violent father and
the criminal life of the ghetto, the poetry collection started a discussion the likes of which no poetry
collection had done before. The book – and Hassan’s controversial statements in newspapers and on
TV – gave rise to a media storm that reached far beyond the country’s borders. A fortnight before
the poetry collection was even issued, he was on nationwide TV and in the newspapers, and the
publishers adjusted the first edition upwards from the usual printrun of 300-400 to 6,000 copies. A
month after publication, it had been printed in 40,000 copies, and after two months it broke all
existing records with 100,000 printed copies. Hassan had by this time become such ‘hot news’ that
all the media were writing and talking about him. An interview with him was even published in The
Wall Street Journal (6.11.2013) and an article about him in The Guardian (12.12.2013). His
appearance at the book fair in Leipzig led to a major article about him and his poems in New York
Times (2.4.2014).
Hassan’s poems and statements about Islam also refuelled the existing debate about freedom of
speech and its limits. When reading from his poetry at various venues in the country, he had to have
police protection, since he had received death threats for his criticism of Islam and had been
attacked at Copenhagen Central Station. That did not make interest in him and his poetry collection
any the less. Everything that Hassan did was closely followed by the media. He was deluged in
glory, quickly gained literature awards from two major dailies and caused a scandal when he
walked out of a TV discussion and did not appear when he was to receive the Politiken prize of
DKK 250,000.
With his poetry collection Hassan became the voice that publishers and newspapers had been
looking for in vain for several years (cf. Aidt 2007). Here was a writer who could express the
experiences that many immigrants in the ghettos possessed, and do so in such a way that both the
immigrants themselves and ethnic Danes could understand it. Hassan provided what seemed to be
an authentic expression of life in the ghetto, and he did so with his own powerful voice and an
anger that had the effect of a blast wave both on TV and in print. He ‘made things the subject of
debate’.
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Hassan’s poems tell the story of a mentally unstable and violent father, youth crime, stays in
institutions for young criminals, the meeting with love, and, above all, of a life caught between
Middle Eastern and Danish culture. The suite of poems describes Hassan’s boyhood and youth up
to the point when he is about to have his poetry collection published and be accepted as a student at
the School of Authors in Copenhagen. It contains such wear-proof and appealing motifs as ‘child
abuse’ and ‘the young man’s revolt against the patriarch’. No punches are pulled and he speaks,
quite literally, in capital letters when expressing his sense of injustice at the cruelty he was exposed
to as a child.
FEM BØRN PÅ RÆKKE OG EN FAR MED EN KØLLE
FLERGRÆDERI OG EN PØL AF PIS (Hassan 2013,5)
FIVE KIDS IN A ROW AND A FATHER WITH A CLUB
POLY CRYING AND A PUDDLE OF PISS.xxiii
On the black & white cover of the collection all it says is ‘Yahya Hassan’. The title and author’s
name are thus one, and there is apparently no fictitious or aesthetic filter between author and text.
This contributes to the feeling of authenticity and sincerity which the poetry collection and the
author together seek to express.
At one and the same time, Hassan was himself in these poems and in a role that he partially
assumed himself and partially was allocated by the public. He appeared to be the ‘gentle ruffian’
and energetic voice of the ghetto. He was a fascinating outlaw both there and in society at large,
since inside the ghetto he committed the ‘outrage’ of saying what he felt about his origins, and
outside had only just abandoned his criminal way of life. By means of his poems he said things
about immigrants that Danes had been prosecuted for, and that were felt to be in bad taste in the
prickly immigration debate. He successfully managed what other debaters had been unable to do,
but at the same time he was both a young, rebellious and eloquent immigrant – and poet. In no time
at all, he became an icon and a role model. Many children and youths with immigrant parents wrote
on his Facebook site and thanked him for the courage he had shown and the urge to revolt that he
had roused in them. And then there were of course those who dissociated themselves strongly from
his revolt against both his parents and Islam.
Hassan’s poetry collection was quickly translated into Swedish, where it was also the subject of
a heated discussion by, among others, the critic and poet Athena Farrokhzad in Aftonbladet
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(22.1.2014). She partially distanced herself from the revolt against Islam, and this created renewed
debate in the Danish media. The bestseller had created something that resembled a never-ending
feedback effect, which meant that the media constantly had something to write about, just as he also
did himself. He wrote a poem about the attack on him, and the poem was published in Politiken.
Later that autumn, his former female guardian, who he had in secret had an erotic relationship with,
published a novel (Louise Østergaard 2014) dealing with their relationship, which again created a
debate and attention focusing on Hassan and his poetry collection. Most recently (summer 2015)
Hassan has been put forward as a parliamentary candidate for the newly formed National Party,
which is seeking to become an alternative to the strongly nationalistic Danish People’s Party, and
wishes to redefine Danishness in a new, broader and more tolerant way. But he failed to attract
enough voters.
Hassan’s poems topped the bestseller lists in November and December 2013, and were able
without difficulty to match such worldwide figures as Dan Brown and Khaled Hosseini and such
solid Danish bestseller writers as Hanne-Vibeke Holst and Sara Blædel. If one converts the sales
figures directly to the Britain, which has 10 times as many inhabitants as Denmark, this corresponds
to 1 million copies being sold in UK in the course of a couple of months. The poems were also
translated into German and English and a number of other European languages, and in Germany
9,000 copies were sold in the first week alone.
Hassan’s poems demonstrate that it is not only possible for a poetry collection to become a
bestseller in 21st century Denmark but also that it is possible for literature to be involved in setting
a political agenda. In addition, it shows how the media symbiosis works at top gear, and how a
bestseller comes into being in an interaction with the classical media as well as the new social
media.
A convincing number
Yahya Hassan’s revolt against his father and the patriarchal order is in line with the revolt that has
been taking place for a couple of centuries in Europe. The problematic relationship between fathers
and sons has been an inexhaustible motif in literature, even in the last few decades, which have
otherwise been characterised by the absence of the father and father figures and the resulting
frustration. But with Hassan, the revolt against the patriarchy acquired a new, concrete expression,
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since the father figure in the poetry collection appears as a raw, violence force. Here he is not just a
symbolic figure but a hard-hitting reality.
Women writers have contributed to the revolt against the patriarchy for decades, since the
patriarchy is the very societal model that has prevented female emancipation. The feminist struggle,
which was only for the few in the early 1970s, became a concern for the many in the succeeding
decades, a fact that can be directly deduced from the bestseller lists. In the 1980s, the feminist
struggle and feminist literature became mainstream. Perhaps it was no longer as controversial as it
had been, but now, on the other hand, it acquired a new importance that impinged profoundly on the
lives of many ‘ordinary’ women. It is difficult to imagine how the female self-awareness that was
roused in broad swathes of the population in the latter half of the 1980s and onwards would have
managed to reach so far out without the bestsellers. Books about women’s life and women’s
emancipation were bought in large numbers and discussed in the women’s groups and reading
circles that became widespread in the 1980s.
The Danish bestseller list from Politiken 29.11.1981 can make it clear what was happening. It
looked like this:
1. Sven Hazel: GPU-fænglset (O.G.P.U. Prison)
2. Suzanne Brøgger: Tone
3. Johannes Møllehave: Læsehest med gåseøjne
4. Lise Nørgaard: Stjernevej
5. Fay Weldon: Støvbold (Puffball)
6. Herdis Møllehave: Lene
7. Alistair MacLean: Den glemte By (River of Death)
8. Simone de Beauvoir: Alle mennesker er dødelige (All Men are Mortal)
9. Erica Jong: Fanny (Fanny)
10. Benny Andersen: Oven visse vande
The list contains at least three types of literature. A male one that deals with the Second World War
and a war in a South American country by the bestseller writers Sven Hazel and Alistair MacLean.
A female one that contains such big Danish names as Suzanne Brøgger, Lise Nørgaard and Herdis
Møllehave and three translated world names: the older Simone de Beauvoir and the much younger
Erica Jong and Fay Weldon from France, USA and UK respectively. And then one finds two of the
Danish bestsellers constantly recurring names: Benny Andersen and Johannes Møllehave, with a
poetry collection and a conversational, humorous introduction to classical literature respectively.
The remarkable thing, however, is that six of the ten books have been written by women and deal to
a great extent with women’s lives.
13
While contemporary portrayals and more or less self-experienced relations characterise
women’s literature in the 1970s, with such titles as Marilyn French: Kvinder (Women, 1978) and
Dea Trier Mørk: Vinterbørn (Winter’s Children, 1976), a shift takes place in the 1980s. The
historical-biographical novel enjoys unusually great popularity. Whereas such novels until then had
been written by men about men, women now appeared on the scene and brought out known and
forgotten female figures from the archives. Now women’s histories were to be told, and it became
possible to mirror oneself in women of the past, whose lives bore witness to women’s heroic
powers in a male-dominated world and to the urge for freedom that had ‘always’ existed. Royal and
noble women were taken care of by such a bestseller writer as Helle Stangerup in her novel
Christine (1985) – the daughter of Christian II– which was on the bestseller lists for no less than
two years. Female artists were also written about, and Dorrit Willumsen published Marie (1983),
which is a novel about the maker of waxworks Marie Tussaud and the French Revolution. What
they shared was the readers came on Christian terms and at eye level with these women. They could
be used as inspiration and encouragement, and they helped explain and illuminate the long path
towards female emancipation.
The cult of the historical-biographical novel was at its height in the 1980s, but it has also been
there ever since, to a lesser extent. Much more recently, the writer Anne Lise Marstrand-Jørgensen
wrote the two-volume work Hildegard (2009-10) ‒ about Hildegard von Bingen ‒ showing via this
medieval novel just what life in a nunnery could have been like, and how it is possible to renounce
sexuality and family life. The historical-biographical novels tells widely diverse stories, but what
they all share is a basic narrative about women who are courageous and independent and who have
an exceptional will to keep pushing on despite all the odds. They are no saints, but have precisely
the number of human ‘flaws’ needed for ordinary women to be able to identify themselves with
them.
This basic narrative was also told by Isabel Allende in Åndernes hus (The House of Spirits
(1982, Danish1985) with its three generations of women; Regine Deforges contributed with Pigen
med den blå cykel (The Blue Bicycle, 1983, Danish 1984) about the erotic and ready-for-action Lea
during the Second World War; Marie Cardinal in Ord som forløser (The Words to Say It, 1975,
Danish 1985) wrote about emancipation through psychoanalysis, and Jean M. Auel, with
Hulebjørnens klan (The Clan of the Cave Bear, 1980, Danish 1981) wrote about girl-power in a
prehistoric age. The new thing in several of these novels was a demonstratively liberated depiction
of female desire and women’s sexuality. Female lust knows no bounds, nor should it do so is what
14
these taboo-breaking novels say. Everything is described in the minutest detail. The time when a
kiss and a cuddle was enough to imply what happened afterwards is over, with sexual intercourse
and blowjobs being portrayed as the most natural thing in the world.
Two of the most read writers of Danish literature – Jane Aamund (b. 1936) and Hanne-Vibeke
Holst (b. 1959) – continued the women’s emancipation basic narrative in the 90s and 00s, bringing
it up to date by dealing with the problems and challenges that the modern career woman has when
she has to manage eroticism, marriage, children and job at the same time. These themes were also
taken up in the immensely popular femi-crime novels of the 00s, continuing the work of taking care
of female self-awareness and thematising lack of freedom wherever it might occur. A number of
male bestseller writers also depicted woman and the female as something particularly valuable in a
world dominated by men and material greed. Peter Høeg depicted her in Frk. Smillas fornemmelse
for sne (Smilla’s Sense of Snow, 1992) and Khaled Hosseini in Under en strålende sol (A Thousand
Splendid Suns, 2007).
Female emancipation, which in the 1980s could appear as the only right course of action, was
not allowed to go unchallenged, however. Especially when the younger generations, children of the
feminist movement, started to express themselves, there came a reaction. Helen Fielding, for
example, took a humorous look at the contradictory demands of the modern woman and her ‘nonsimultaneous’ wish for a prince on a white horse in Bridget Jones’ dagbog (Bridget Jones’s
Diary,1996, Danish 1997). With this chick lit, the feminist movement set off on a new track (cf.
Whelehan 2005). But there were also more radical showdowns with the emancipation from the
traditional family patterns that had typified the 1970s. What all these rebellions shared was that the
rebels are children of the fragmented nuclear family.
When women broke out in order to realise themselves, or when they felt they could do without
men and manage the children on their own, there was a price to be paid. According to the younger
bestseller authors, the children suffered under this emancipation. The Danish writer Synnøve Søe
created a furore when, in 1989, she published the autobiographical novel Fars (Father’s), which
portrays a relationship between a father and daughter that resembles incest and one between a
mother and daughter where the mother ignores her child’s interests for her own erotic life. A child
was maltreated and no care was taken to ensure that it could grow up in a secure, familiar
framework. It is the same point of departure we find in such diverse bestsellers as Kirsten Thorup’s
Ingenmandsland (No Man’s Land, 2003), Jens Christian Grøndahl’s Fire dage i marts (Four Days
in March, 2008) and such worldwide hits as Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight (2005) and E.L James’
15
Fifty Shades of Grey (2011). In all children of divorced parents and of distant fathers and mothers
there is a strong wish to re-establish the patriarchal order. While women writers such as Jane
Åmund (1997) and Maria Helleberg (2002) mock the younger generations for being puritanical and
narrow-minded, they reply by criticising the mothers for being adolescent and immature and for
never having taken responsibility. The roles are reversed, with the children behaving like the
parents they never had.
All the male writers did not support women’s emancipation, as Peter Høeg did, for example.
From the 1980s onwards there was a tendency for the men to move away from everyday life and
cultivate war, action drama or the humorous tale. A marked characteristic was the conception of
culture as an intolerable burden. Jørn Riel wrote humorous tall stories in the 1970s and 1980s about
harsh hunting life in northeast Greenland (Riel 2008). Here one was outside the domain of women
and boring work from 8am-4pm. One could cultivate the companionship of men, hunting and the
vast wildness of nature.
The dream of a masculine universe in the midst of a world dominated by women and
bureaucracy is still going strong in the popular crime-writer Jussi Adler Olsen, who made his
international breakthrough in the 2010s with the series about the detective superintendent Carl
Mørk. The first volume was Kvinden i buret (Mercy, 2007). He too depicts a masculine world that
resists all forms of authority as well as women who want to lay down the law. Some sort of
explanation for this cult of the masculine can be found in Carsten Jensen’s family saga Vi de
druknede (We, the Drowned, 2006), which tells the story of how a matriarchy resists boys becoming
seamen and setting out on the hazardous ocean, and how women thereby seek to smother something
masculine and valuable. The novel gave rise to quite a lot of debate as to whether it was actually
women who were the cause of all Denmark’s misfortunes, and whether Carsten Jensen was nothing
but a reactionary male chauvinist.
There are good and great heroes in Danish literature, but when one excludes the members of
the resistance in the time of the Occupation (1940-45) and police superintendents with their heart in
the right place, they are thin on the ground and most assume the form of anti-heroes. The anti-hero
is the Danish hero, and if one wants ‘real’ heroes who are neither comic or tragic hen-pecked
husbands, they have to be imported from countries with a more heroic culture than the Danish.
Alistair McLean, Ken Follet and Dan Brown are all proficient in supplying male heroes who know
their stuff, and who have not done down in advance by Danish laughter, which is always ready to
ridicule the heroic. Or one will have to go to the women instead. While the number of male, Danish
16
heroes, if one estimates them from the literature of the bestseller lists, has fallen drastically in the
course of the latter half of the 20th century, the number of female heroes has increasingly been
found on the lists.xxiv This is particularly obvious among the highly popular crime writers that
include such names as the Danish writers Sara Blædel and Elsebeth Egholm and the Swedish
writers Liza Marklund and Camilla Läckberg. One finds the woman as front figure in the struggle
for female equality, whether it took place in prehistoric times, the Renaissance, during the French
Revolution or in our own time. Hanne-Vibeke Holst portrays her in the trilogy Kronprinsessen (The
Crown Princess, 2002-08), which deals with a female politician who enters the political power-play
game and ends up as prime minister. The series appeared three years before Helle Thorning
Schmidt actually became Denmark’s first woman prime minister, thereby realising the dreams and
expectations that had been accumulating for several decades.
Values under discussion
Literature is a mirror. Nobody any longer asks it, however, who is the fairest in the land, but who is
the strongest. The answer, according to many bestsellers is that women are the strongest. But such
an honour also means responsibility. Women are not only passive victims any longer – they can
transform themselves into unscrupulous villains too. Marie Cardinal touched on this in her
psychoanalytical study Ord som forløser (The Words to Say It), where it transpires that behind the
father figure there is a disappointed and destructive mother. The female principle, as in the mother’s
urge to protect her child, can turn her into an ice-cold killer, as Kerstin Ekman has portrayed in
Hændelser ved vand (Blackwater, 1993, Danish 1994). And her jealously can make things hot for
other women. Most criminals, however, are still men, and equality on that score has not been
introduced in the universe of crime stories – nor has it in the world of reality.
But then bestsellers do not first and foremost describe facts. They discuss dreams, world
pictures and values. With a somewhat antiquated concept, one could say that bestsellers have made
an on-going contribution to the debate on the philosophy of life. This can take place indirectly via
the world pictures that literature provides. This is particularly obvious in the philosophical and
spiritual books that appeared in the 1990s by authors such as Paulo Coelho, James Redfield, Jostein
Gaarder and Peter Høeg. Here too it also becomes clear that bestseller literature likes to state that
the world can become a better place to live in if people will improve and become aware of true
values.
17
Such edifying conceptions are also to be found within women’s literature as well as in the
politicising literature of, for example, Peter Høeg, who in Kvinden og aben (The Woman and the
Ape, 1996) advocates a different, spiritual society than one based on materialism, science and
capitalism. One can also see this in Kim Leine’s Profeterne i Evighedsfjorden (The Prophets of
Eternal Fjord, 2012), which, in a historical backward look at the years of the revolution at the end
of the 18th century, tells of how Danish colonialists suppressed the Greenlanders. He lets a halfGreenlander woman have a vision of a community reminiscent of that of Rousseau and lets
Greenlanders create a temporary utopia that stands as a model for present-day readers.
In stark contrast to modernist literature and its informed critics, popular literature has tried to
formulate answers to some of the existential and political questions that ‘highbrow’ literature only
sought to pose and at best can only come up with negative answers to. While modernist literature
stops at negation, because everything else presumably results in lies and plaster saints, popular
literature formulates positive counter-images.
The best-selling authors are apparently allowed to preach and be arbiters of taste and politically
correct – as long as they do not bore their readers. On the one hand readers approve of it, and on the
other hand they like to see themselves challenged by satire and coarse humour. People like to read
the Swede Jonas Jonasson: Den hundredeårige der kravlede ud af vinduet og forsvandt (The
Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared, 2009, Danish 2010)
about a man who, on his 100th birthday, breaks out of his over-controlled old people’s home to set
out on adventures. And people want to read about women who uninhibitedly do everything that
real, emancipated and independent women do not do. Helen Fielding and E.L. James have written
about this as regards gender and sexuality, while Anne Lise Marstrand-Jørgensen has written about
it as regards religious fanaticism and chastity in her portrayal of Hildegard von Bingen.
Serious writers and critics often complain that literature does not set any agenda and does not
have any societal effect. But various bestsellers have actually moved in that direction. At regular
intervals, popular literature does manage to set an agenda. It is perhaps not equally as qualified in
its point of departure, either aesthetically or politically, and it is not always the brainiest people who
lead the debate, but it is there, and it increasingly unfolds on the Internet, where everyone can take
part. Yahya Hassan’s poems started an unprecedentedly large discussion, but so did ‘coloured’
books such as Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and E.L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey. Brown
started a discussion about Christianity, and James got women – yet again – to discuss sexuality and
gender.
18
The local and the global
Two out of three titles on the Danish bestseller lists, at an estimate, have been written by Danish
writers and deal with Danish conditions, no matter whether they are historical novels, contemporary
novels or the more seldom collections of poetry or short stories. The interest for the local is striking,
and in this respect the Danish bestseller lists do not differ from those of other countries. People
want to read a story about themselves or about something that is close to their world and that they
feel they recognise. In Danish literature, the near past in the 20th century is much described by such
writers as Jane Aamund in Klinkevals (The Two Penny Dance, 1989), Annemarie Løn in
Prinsesserne (The Princesses, 1996) and Jens Smærup Sørensen i Mærkedage (Anniversaries,
2005). In particular, the restructuring of country life from traditional family farming to large-scale
industrial agriculture and the ensuing cultural transformation has been described. The revolution
regarding machinery within agriculture and the migration from country to town is related in great
detail in both bestsellers and the underwood of books with the same theme that sell less well. In the
description of this reorganisation of society it has been possible to follow as in a prism the change
of mentality that the 20th century has featured, with its loss of tradition, new types of family
structure and new opportunities for the individual.
However, international literary and ideological tendencies have also always been in evidence in
Danish bestsellers. When magical realism came to the West from South America with Gabriel
García Márquez and Isabel Allende, it made a distinct impact on such bestseller writers as Peter
Høeg and Ib Michael in the 1980s and 1990s. The same applied to the fantasy genre, which became
a great hit, first with J.R.R. Tolkien and later with J.K. Rowling and George R.R. Martin. A Danish
counterpart can be found in Lene Kaaberbøl, who has also enjoyed international success with
Skammer-serien (The Shamer Chronicles, 2001-03). Direct Danicising tendencies are to be found in
Henriette Lind, Lotte Thorsen and Anette Vestergaard’s Nynnes Dagbog (Nynne’s Diary, 20002010), which is a kind of cover version of Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’ Diary, since London is
replaced by Copenhagen, and the lifestyle and events refer to Danish conditions.
Danish readers have sought Danish environments and Danish history, but they have also
constantly been on the lookout for the exotic. Danish writers such as Ib Michael, Troels Kløvedal
and Carsten Jensen have, with their travel novels and travel accounts, offered readers exotic
locations in distant climes. Kløvedal and Michael have even incarnated the dream of the never-
19
ending holiday under a tropical sun, while Jensen has travelled the globe in order to confront
himself – and the reader – with the political ideas of his youth concerning the world, and its actual
state. The travel accounts have mainly been bestsellers in Denmark, which fits in well with the look
the traveller takes of the world. He is quite cosmopolitan in his view, but also provincial in his
interpretation. He always compared the foreign with the domestic that he shares with other Danes,
and he is always at home in and with his Danish language.
The Danish readers have also been able to find the exotic in the translated authors. Isabel
Allende, with Åndernes Hus (The House of Spirits) and Eva Luna (1987) took readers with her to
colourful Latin America. They were taken to China with Jung Chang’s Vilde svaner (Wild Swans,
1991, Danish 1993) and Amy Tan’s Klub held og glæde (The Joy Luck Club, 1989), to India with
Arundahti Roy’s De små tings gud (The God of Small Things, 1997), to Egypt with Alaa alAswany’s Yacoubians hus (The Yacoubian Building, 2003, Danish 2007), Afghanistan with Khaled
Hosseini’s Drageløberen (The Kite Runner, 2003, Danish 2004) and Japan with Haruki Murakami’s
Kafka på stranden (Kafka on the Shore, 2002, Danish 2007).
These authors, who are not only bestsellers in Denmark but throughout the West, have several
common traits that cut across ‘geography’. While earlier it was the Western writers who went to the
exotic countries, it is now the writers of the exotic countries who come to the West and its readers.
It is characteristic that a majority of the writers from the developing countries who have become
bestsellers are migrants or educated in the West. They are refugees, immigrants or children of
immigrants and thus, in terms of consciousness, are familiar with more than one culture.
With these writers, a Western reading audience acquired an alternative access to the exotic
world. It came from the ‘people’ itself, so to speak, and often in a de-idealised form. This means
that the exotic is not only a fantasy space for the Western writer but also something that is offered
us ‘authentically’ from what to us still is an exotic place. The writers describe their childhood and
youth in their respective exotic countries seen from a Western angle, since it is from here that they
are written.
Perhaps it is precisely the built-in Western angle and conceptual world that has made them the
most popular. They are admittedly strange, but not so strange in their way of thinking that they
become incomprehensible and insurmountably difficult for a Western audience to follow. And then
they write about well-known themes and in literary forms and genres that the audience at large is
familiar with. The writers are part of the globalisation that has taken place in terms of economics,
work and culture during the last quarter of the 20th century, and that one can see expressed in the
20
book-market bestseller lists. Here there are writers who have made a breakthrough worldwide, and
who have taken turns in providing hungry readers with constantly new insights into exotic cultures.
That the local and national are interesting for a local and national audience is easy to
understand. The joy of recognition and possibility of identification are, at any rate, immediately
present. But the local and national also play an important role in large sections of international
bestseller literature, although other factors also apply in this respect.
International bestsellers can be divided into at least two groups, each with its own tendency.
There is a kind of supranational – i.e. most often Western-influenced – literature that appeals to a
large, broad audience. There can be a kind of ‘airport literature’, with quickly read novels in such
well-known genres as thrillers, crime stories and romances. There is, for example, Dan Brown’s Da
Vinci mysteriet (The Da Vinci Code, 2003). It admittedly takes place on French and British soil, but
the surroundings are places one has either been to or knows from media or other fictional works.
They are tourist localities such as the Louvre and central London around Westminster and
Buckingham Palace – localities that, funnily enough, it has been possible to make a tourism
industry out of, since people make pilgrimages to places mentioned in fiction.
So there is an international mainstream literature, but there is also a popular ‘world literature’,
with a strong local and national flavour. Here the local remains local, but at the same time it can be
transformed into something exotic and interesting in other people’s eyes. As an example of how the
local can become exotic, one could name the modern Scandinavian crime story, which takes place
in the Scandinavian welfare society. While it all seems perfectly obvious to Scandinavian readers,
to ‘others’ it appears to be exotic.
The national and international are also involved in various kinds of metabolisms. It is far from
always the lowest common denominator that makes a novel an international bestseller. It is not
necessarily a question of ignoring the local and the particular. The path to the universal and timeless
comes seldom from removing the concrete and characteristic of the period but by means of them.
The infinitely big is to be found in the infinitely small, and that is why that which appeals to an
international audience is also to be found in the local and national (Georg Brandes 1869). For it is
here that fiction gains its colouring and concretion. It is from here that it fetches its realism and
authenticity. Even in the fantasy genre, with a universe that is fantastic and often characterised by a
kind of stylised Middle Ages, the local plays a role. The British boarding school system, for
example, underlies the universe of Harry Potter in J.K. Rowling’s series. For Danish children it
21
becomes a part of the universe of fantasy, since generally speaking they have no experience of
boarding schools.
The exotic, however, is a relative and transient phenomenon. The exotic depends on the eyes
that do the seeing. For that reason, the exotic is not reserved for what is geographically distant but
can also be found within Danish borders. When Jakob Ejersbo depicts a pusher environment in the
provincial city of Aalborg in the novel Nordkraft (2002), it is exotic in the sense that the
environment is unknown to most readers. One could speak of a social exoticism with a strong
appeal. There is also a historical exoticism that historical novels make use of. When Kim Leine in
Profeterne i Evighedsfjorden (The Prophets of Eternal Fjord) writes about Greenland in the 1790s,
the novel is not only exotic because of its arctic environment and its Eskimos but because it takes
the reader back to a period that in the scenes from Denmark and Norway are very unfamiliar to a
present-day reader.
If one looks at the Danish bestseller lists for the past 35 years, there is a geographical breadth
that takes the reader far and wide in time and space, but at the same time there is also a narrow
contact and context. The Northern aspect is well-represented and constant, with such names as
Herbjørg Wassmo, Karl Ove Knausgård, Mikael Niemi and crime writers such as Jo Nesbø,
Camilla Läckberg, Liza Marklund and Henning Mankell. But throughout the whole period the list is
only headed by two French writers (Marie Cardinal and Régine Deforges), one Italian (Umberto
Eco), one Spanish (Ildefonso Falcones) and one German (Michael Ende). Anglo-American names
dominate, on the other hand, with such names as Marilyn French, Fay Weldon, Jean M. Auel, J.K.
Rowling, Dan Brown and Stephenie Meyer. The literary world picture is then strongly represented,
which corresponds though to the general import of art and culture, which also comes in greatest
quantities from USA and UK.
Internationalisation thus only characterises bestsellers in a narrow sense, since the translated
literature comes from a small number of countries, and typically from a Western and Englishlanguage literature. This pattern of a rich national literature combined with a relatively small
number of international bestsellers is also typical of Norway, Sweden, German and England if one
looks at their bestseller lists. Here too one finds relatively few mega-bestsellers such as Isabel
Allende, Peter Høeg, Paolo Coelho, Dan Brown, J.K. Rowling, Stephenie Meyer, Stieg Larsson and
Jussi Adler-Olsen. These authors have supplied works that have a broad international appeal, so one
can speak of a popular world literature. This world literature, however, always functions in a local
and national context and alongside books that never – when it comes to a small language area such
22
as Danish – reach beyond the country’s borders. The local and national are still a large and
important factor in an otherwise globalised world – seen from a bestseller perspective.
Bestseller perspectives
As can be seen from the above, there are no precise figures and statistics for bestsellers, which one
could perhaps have hoped for from an investigation that has a quantitative starting point. A task for
future sociological research must be to arrive at as precise figures as possible for the number of
copies sold. But that is quite a difficult task, as there are many players in action both nationally and
internationally and since, for reasons of competition, one is reluctant to tell others how many copies
one is managing to sell. Nor are sales figures alone enough to be able to map the reading and
behaviour of readers. Such figures must, as a minimum, be combined with borrowing figures from
libraries.
It is, however, one thing what people buy and borrow and quite another what they read and
how they use books. The social media can be a way of finding out what readers think and say to
each other about books. The rich exchange of opinions, for example, on all the media with regards
to Yahya Hassan could be an important starting point for such studies. In more limited fora, it is
possible to follow the discussion of various works by virtual reading groups. So what is important
here is not so much the researcher’s own sophisticated interpretation of a text but of finding out
what the work has set in motion in its readers.
A combination of statistical facts, thematic and genre-related investigations can prepare the
way for comparative studies that can map more precisely similarities and differences between
various regions, countries and markets. Moretti (2005) has shown how one can use graphs of
various kinds so as to ask new questions and reveal new issues that literary researcher has not
caught sight of as yet. A similar procedure used on contemporary literature could – as Karl
Berglund’s studies of Swedish crime stories show (2012) – help to lead literary research along other
paths than the usual ones. But what it ultimately comes down to is to get the study of contemporary
literature to deal with the literature that many readers are interested in and influenced by. We must
know what takes place in both the national and the global market. We must know what moves these
readers, so that we are not only able to interpret texts but also understand how these texts function
in society and what ideological and socio-psychological role they play.
23
(Translated by John Irons)
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i
See, for example, Thykier 2011, Stjernfeldt and Thomsen 2005: 9-31 and Handesten 2014:51-55.
Handesten 2015a.
iii
Ibid.
iv
Ibid.
v
Concerning the literary circuit, see Hertel 1996.
vi
Grøn 2013 and Handesten 2014: 63 ff.
vii
See Liberaliseringen af bogmarkedet. En evaluering set med forbrugernes øjne. Konkurrence- og
Forbrugerstyrelsen, November 2013. Can be accessed here:
https://www.kfst.dk/~/media/KFST/Publikationer/Dansk/2013/20131113%20Liberaliseringen%20af%20bogmarkedet%
20nov.pdf
viii
See ‘Folkebiblioteker på markedsvilkår’. Bogmarkedet 8.12.2008. Can be accessed here:
http://bogmarkedet.dk/artikel/folkebiblioteker-p%C3%A5-markedsvilk%C3%A5r
ix
Jochumsen and Rasmussen 2006.
x
See Gundhild Agger 2008 and Hejlsted 2009.
xi
See for example Svendsen 2015.
xii
Research into bestsellers does, however, take place in other countries – see: Whelehan (2005) on chicklit, Heilmann
2009 on Harry Potter and Sara Kärrholm 2014 on the Millennium Trilogy. A growing interesting in the research field in
Denmark can also be seen in Academic Quarter vol. 7/December 2013: Bestseller and Blockbuster Culture, which
contains papers from the conference of the same name in Aalborg, 22-23 March 2013.
http://www.akademiskkvarter.hum.aau.dk/07_12_2013.php
xiii
On Moretti, genre and ‘distant reading’, see Handesten 2015b.
xiv
The presentation follows in general outline in Handesten 2010 and 2014.
xv
Sutherland 2002:7.
xvi
For further discussion of the concept cf. Halgason 2014:9-16.
xvii
Cf. Andersen 2008, Agger 2008 and Hejlsted 2009.
xviii
Hertel 1996:30, Sutherland 2007 and Handesten: 2014:508
xix
J.A. Appelyard 1994:166.
xx
Cf. Handesten 2015c.
xxi
Gasset 1972:9.
xxii
Auken et al. 2014.
xxiii
Translation Al and Kuku Agami. Cf. http://www.dr.dk/nyheder/kultur/boeger/dansk-rapper-en-gave-oversaetteyahya-hassan
xxiv
The figures quoted here are based on estimations. There is no broad statistical material on which to base
calculations. As far as the bestsellers are concerned, they constititue about 45% of the total number of books sold in
Denmark. Indications that female writers are strongly represented come from library borrowing statistics that are
collected at bibliotek.dk and that one can following regularly via bibliotek.dk’s press room –
https://bibliotek.dk/da/adhl/top/20. They are mentioned in the daily newspaper Information 20.1.2011, see:
http://www.information.dk/256089.
ii
28