Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle (2009-2011) is by now well established as a major work of modern Scandinavian literature. The work is also perhaps the richest description we have of everyday life in Scandinavia around the turn of the last millennium. The four decades from 1980 to 2010 that Knausgaard details so well were a period of rapid social change in Scandinavia. Social Democracy's monopoly on politics dwindled. A new middle class arose. The world arrived. In this volume, scholars from the history of ideas, social psychology, sociology, social anthropology, political science, and literary studies have joined hands to help readers grasp these changes and how they animate the work. While we do offer textual analyses as well as close readings of Knausgaard's oeuvre itself, the focus is firmly on the historical and social contexts that may help us understand why young Karl Ove came to understand his father as abusive, how he could go to university without family support, why the novels became the greatest literary event in Norway since the Second World War, and so on. The work is deemed a highly useful reader's companion to a modern classic in world literature.
