Public Defence: Kamilla Aslaksen

The District Governor’s Daughters (1854/1855) by Camilla Collett is Norway’s first modern novel. It is a literary representation of and inquiry into a bourgeois milieu in the periphery of Europe during the early stages of modernity. With a book-historical approach, and through Walter Benjamin's concept "the life of a work", this thesis explores Collett’s novel as a socially, textually and materially situated phenomenon. Based on the understanding that the literary fields of the 19th century must be seen in the light of the period’s symbolic split of the genders into to two spheres, four dimensions of the novel’s life are explored.

(1) One of the preconditions for the The District Governor’s Daughters is the expanding book industry of the early 19th century. The novel has more than 150 references to books, reading and readers that thus makes books a crucial element in Collett's realistic universe. By reading The District Governor’s Daughters as a "library", and examining the function of reading in the text, the thesis shows how books and reading shape minds, ideas and relationships. Through the symbolic universes conveyed via translated novels, The District Governor’s Daughters explores and challenges the double gender discourse and its grave consequences. 

(2) The thesis gives an analysis of the reception of The District Governor’s Daughters from a book-historical perspective. Compared to other books from the same period – by Henrik Ibsen, for example – the interest in the book was broad and intense. The novel challenged the field’s doxa both aesthetically and ethically, especially its gender stereotypes. The reception of The District Governor’s Daughters as a social novel paved the way for modern literary criticism in Norway.

(3) Collett published the The District Governor’s Daughters anonymously, and later she used the pseudonym "The author of The District Governor’s Daughters". The thesis examines the social (Foucault) and paratextual (Genette) functions of these strategies. Anonymity was a way to submit to the 19th-century’s gender demarcations, but it also steered critics away from typical ad feminam readings of the novel. The pseudonym functioned as branding and the author’s persona, in a book market where the author’s name had become an important asset. 

(4) The last dimension explored in the thesis, is the material life of the The District Governor’s Daughters. Bindings, typography, paratexts etc. in The District Governor’s Daughters-editions from 1854 until today are examined. The thesis analyses the relationship between text, materiality and meaning (McKenzie), in the light of various technological innovations and ever-changing literary public spheres.