The Aspiring Author Meets the Metropolis

Abstract

The article builds on perspectives in urban sociology on the modern city as a site of both freedom and constraint, as well as perspectives in urban literary criticism on the city as a system, as sense-specific, and as pointing to the future. These insights support the core goal of unpacking the young Swedish writer Eyvind Johnson’s meeting with the Continental European metropolis after World War I. This aim is realized in two steps. First, the article tracks Johnson’s subjective response to the city and the development of his aesthetic thinking through the lens of his correspondence from late 1921 to early 1923. Second, the article explores the literary outcome of the meeting with the metropolis in the form of a group of innovative but largely unappreciated short stories that Johnson published in newspapers in 1923. Finally, the article argues that the metropolitan experience furthered Johnson’s career as a writer, with the short fiction pieces serving as stepping stones toward his unique brand of expansive modernism, manifested in his subsequent book publications from the 1920s.