In his study of Carl Michael Bellman literary historian Gustaf Ljunggren (1823-1905) compared the Swedish poet not only to the traditional object of comnaprison, the ancient Greek poet Anacreon, but also to the Persian fourteenth-century poet Hafiz.This article revisits Ljunggren's work in light of recent discussions about world literature and the role of historical scale in literary studies. I investigate how a change of scale, in large part due to the pressures of professionalization, created many of the prevailing assumptions concerning the proper object of Swedish literary studies and its connections to the literature of other countries. In Ljunggren's work we find an interesting alternative to the view of nation and periodization that came to dominate the discipline.

This article seeks to describe a particular relationship between a contemporary Swedish poet and the literary tradi-tion. Here the works of Eva Ribich are compared to the obsolete descriptive poems of the eighteenth century, as repre-sented by Johan Gabriel Oxenstierna (1750–1818). The comparison seeks to lay bare a similarity, based on how theircommon theme – the times of day – creates the formal dynamic of the poems themselves. Furthermore, the aspectsof Ribich’s poetry that critics have found problematic – their distanced observation of nature and the somewhat staticpastoral quality – are illuminated by this comparison. By including reception in the comparison between the poems,one can point to a horizon of expectation that has been in place for a long time and that poses obstacles to a properunderstanding of this kind of poetry. These parallels between the poems are interesting not as examples of overt affi-liation or creative rewriting but as examples of a collective, anonymous tradition, based on sedimented literary formand widespread patterns of cognition.

The article treats the place of the body in thecultural criticism of Viktor Rydberg, not only as a central theme but also as an image with the potential to figuratively describe societal and even cosmic relationships. Rydberg’s idealof the symmetrical and athletic body is seen inthe perspective of his dependence on German neo-humanism and the gymnastic movement.The ideal of bodily symmetry figures as an image of universal man who defies the division of labor, while the deformed body inversely figures as an image of the lack of wholeness in a stratified bourgeois society. This is further elucidated by an analysis of Rydberg’s view of Darwinism and his fear of degeneration .In the final section, special attention is given to Rydberg’s broodings on the “Future of theWhite Race”. In this text, the body is a figure of the collectivity (the body politic) and its diseases signify political and moral crisis, while the remedy for this state of affairs lies in recognizing the unity of the living, the deadand the unborn in the body of Christ.

The article constitutes an interdisciplinary study of the comic play På Gröna Lund (1856) by Hedvig von Numers, viewed as a significant contribution to the cultural memory of Sweden’s Gustavian era (1772–1809). Building on recent theoretical perspectives, the workings of cultural memory are investigated in sev-eral dimensions. To begin with, by studying the conditions of its staging and its reception by an audience, we investigate how an experience of historical authen-ticity was created. In the next step, the historical content of the play is interpreted and contextualised by relating it to popular and scholarly historiography of the period, and by studying its use of comic conventions in the service of historical representation. Taken together, these approaches show the complexity of nine-teenth century memory culture when confronted with the recent Gustavian past.