Fredrik Renard

Biography

Assistant Professor of German Literature at Uppsala University and Pro Futura Scientia XX Fellow at Stockholm University and the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala (from 2027). I received my PhD from Stockholm University and Justus Liebig University (Giessen) in 2020. From 2022 to 2025 I was a postdoctoral research fellow at Stockholm University and the Ca’ Foscari University in Venice with the research project The Narration of Experience and the Modern Novel, funded by the Swedish Research Council.

Research

My research addresses questions in poetics, genre theory, historical narratology and phenomenology, with a focus on European literature from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, often employing a comparative approach. I have been particularly interested in the novel as a historical form and a theoretical object: on one hand, how the emergence and development of the novel generated new ways of seeing and narrating the world against the backdrop of the cultural and societal upheavals brought about by modernity; on the other, how the novel – from Goethe and Hegel to Bakhtin and Lukács – has served as a constant source for theories about how the nature of that modernity is to be understood in the first place. This focus has led to, among other things, a dissertation on the emergence of the modern German novel in the eighteenth century (later revised into a book) and several articles on narrative issues related to novelistic storytelling and novel theory.

In my current research, I examine how literature interrogates the physical, perceptual and experiential dimensions of reality on a formal and conceptual level. A particular focus lies on how literature engages with the fundamental forces of nature through its representation of movement and weight. My Pro Futura-project, Falling Matters: On Weight and Gravity in Literature (funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond), explores the role that weight and gravity play in literary texts, asking how fiction responds to the fact that bodies and objects fall toward the ground in the absence of support. I am also interested in the relationship between generic forms and the senses – what one might call formal phenomenologies – namely, how different genres generate distinct modes of inhabiting time, space, and the body.

My research has appeared/is forthcoming in such journals as Criticial Inquiry, Poetics Today, New Literary History, Modernism/modernity, and Orbis Litterarum.

Selected publications

Renard, Fredrik, “After Negation: Bildung and Modernist Form from Death in Venice to The Magic Mountain,” forthcoming in Modernism/modernity, vol. 32, no. 2 (2026) [preliminary date].

Renard, Fredrik, “The Circumstantial View of Life: Narrative and the Novelistic Peripeteia,” Poetics Today, vol. 46, no. 2 (2025).

Renard, Fredrik, “The Moment Unbound: When Romance Broke Free From Epic,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 51, no. 2 (2025), 268–289.

Renard, Fredrik, “The Homelessness of the Novel: Friedrich Blanckenburg’s Novel Poetics,” New Literary History, vol. 54, no. 2 (2023), 1169–1191.

Renard, Fredrik, Arbeit am Zufall: Die Formierung des modernen deutschen Romans im 18. Jahrhundert, Berlin: J.B. Metzler (2021).