“Flights to the North”

Melanie Hawthorne offers an insight into the ways of imagining the North in fin de siècle French literature. Hawthorne reads several works of French decadent fiction, some from the period of decadent decline, in which a Nordic setting serves as a “blank” (white) space onto which the imagination can project new and daring narratives. The phenomenon has its roots in the French Revolution, as seen through the prism of works by Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley, followed by others. Hawthorne analyses Renée Vivien’s use of the image of the black swan against the background of the Nordic cultures. The chapter closes by exploring how the blank space transforms into dark colors in twenty-first-century Nordic noir.