Literary practices, capital structures and political position-taking: The Norwegian writers during World War II

Analyses of writers’ political orientations have typically focused on individual authors’ works and trajectories. Inspired by Bourdieu's field theory and by Sapiro's works on the French literary field, this article demonstrates how the Norwegian writers’ position-takings during WW II were related to their locations in two other sets of structures: the structures in the Norwegian field of literary practices in the 1930s and '40s, and their locations in cultural, economic and social capital hierarchies. Based on data on 308 writers we ask: How did the writers and intellectuals respond to democratic backsliding, loss of cultural autonomy and authoritarianism on the rise?

Three main literary oppositions were uncovered by way of MCA: Non-Fiction vs. Fiction, Traditional vs Modern literature and Popular vs. Other literature. These oppositions were structured along hierarchies of personal and inherited cultural capital, and of economic capital. The association between literary and political orientations was clear. Urban, modern-oriented writers with upper-class backgrounds had higher probabilities of partaking in resistance, while more marginal, tradition-oriented writers with a lower-class origin had higher probabilities of supporting the occupation; during WWII, the literary elite thus faced both an external shock and a challenge “from below”.

Out of eight literary clusters, five were political: Academics, Modernists, Proletarians, National Romanticists and Vitalists. Nazi-sympathizing or collaborating writers were overrepresented in latter two. But a Class Specific MCA revealed internal divisions among the Nazi-sympathizing or collaborating writers that did not mirror those found in the global space; distinct hierarchies were at work. When analyzing how a given constellation of factors might produce different outcomes across a population, the integration of MCA and CSA therefore offers a promising approach.