Fiction and Reality in Smilla's Sense Of Snow

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By this: publisher
In this Subject: History ,&nbsp; Political Science
By this author: Annelies van Hees

Author: Annelies van Hees

Source: European Studies: A Journal of European Culture, History and Politics, The New Georgics. Rural and Regional Motifs in the Contemporary European Novel. Edited by Liesbeth Korthals Altes & Manet van Montfrans. , pp. 215-226(12)

Publisher: Rodopi

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Abstract:

Peter Høeg's novel Smilla's Sense of Snow is analyzed as a provincial novel, a novel about the contrast between Copenhagen, here a city of technology, conspiracy and evil, and the pure Greenland, the country of nature and origin for Smilla, the protagonist. The text mentions the historical origins of this particular postcolonial view of the Danish oppression of its colony. With regard to the novel's postfeminist attitude the sources for the description of the ambivalent gender-identity of its protagonist are examined. The article ends with the overall analysis of the novel in a Lacanian-inspired view on the city-country opposition as the opposition between the imaginary, lost mother-land and the symbolic father-land.

Document Type: Research article

Publication date: 2002-06-01