Max Richter: "The Recalibration of Literary Competition in the Swedish Academy. Shifting Objects of Evaluation around 1900"

Research presentation by Max Richter, Universität Bielefeld/LMU München. 

Abstract: 

The Swedish Academy had a tradition of awarding literary prizes long before the task to award the Nobel Prize in Literature made the institution world famous at the turn of the 19th to the 20th Century. These earlier prizes, installed in the late 18th Century and referred to as ‘competitions’ (‘tävlingar’), differ significantly from the latter ‘world prize’ (‚världspris’) in several ways, yet they share the challenge of rendering highly singularized literary entities comparable. Examining a few practical changes in the transition period around 1900 when focus shifted from the earlier prizes to the Nobel Prize, I will discuss how objects of literary evaluation are constituted differently when authorship is either disclosed or concealed and when texts are either submitted or requested.