The University of the Faroe Islands’ forthcoming national literary history partakes of that typical characteristic of Faroese high culture, belatedness: a 19th-century project in the 21st-century, if you will. In what might be termed a reverse chronology, scholars reared on Marxism, feminism, deconstruction and post-colonial studies must select a canon and present it in a conventional format. However, within the parameters of the miniscule Faroese literary universe, unprecedented inclusiveness not only becomes possible but necessary, and our national literary history becomes the narrative of a collaborative effort where a small amount of writing falls in the high-literary genres, a handful of writers are able to claim this as their profession, and, in quantitative terms, Faroese-language writing only recently has come to outweigh Danish-language writing.
Keywords: faroes, canon, language, denmark, nationalism
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