Allegories of an Embattled Public: The Red Thread of the Modern Swedish Crime Novel

Abstract

Abstract:This essay takes up the red thread of the Swedish crime novel-Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö's Martin Beck series (1965-75), Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander novels (1991-99 and 2009), and Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy (2005-07)-through three forms of what Fredric Jameson terms cognitive mapping: realism, national allegory, and the allegorical encounter narrative. I do so in order to grasp, in new ways, the concrete labor, or symbolic actions, of these narratives, as they remold the content and form of their shared literary practice to respond to the dramatically changing global historical landscape in which they are located.