Skip to main content

Nordic Noir as Affective Mapping

Reimagining the Welfare States

Nordic Noir as Affective Mapping cover

Nordic Noir as Affective Mapping

Reimagining the Welfare States

Quantity
Pre-order. Available 29 Apr 2027
$144.00 RRP $180.00 Website price saving $36.00 (20%)

Payment for this pre-order will be taken when the item becomes available

Description

Nordic Noir as Affective Mapping: Reimagining the Welfare States examines the paradox of how some of the world's happiest countries produce some of its darkest television. It argues that this televisual form represents the Nordic welfare states not as secure and egalitarian societies but as fractured environments marked by uncertainty, fear and social decline.

The book establishes Nordic noir as a distinctive televisual group style, combining modernist art cinema techniques, popular crime-genre conventions and Nordic regional elements. Its melancholic style work together with crime narratives to generate negative affects, particularly melancholy, fear and despondency. The concept of affective mapping explains how these affects are connected to historically specific social conditions, including precarious work, gender inequality, loneliness, institutional retrenchment, neoliberalism and globalization. Nordic noir thereby maps the relationship between social structures and private experience, presenting distress as collective and historically produced rather than simply individual.

The author further argues that Nordic noir's critique of the welfare state is ultimately a defence of its social democratic ideals. By exposing contradictions between equality, solidarity and security as ideals and their uneven realization in everyday life, the genre encourages viewers to reconsider their affective experiences and the changing conditions of the welfare state. Nordic noir thus demonstrates how popular television can produce cultural knowledge about social reality, making the affective dimensions of social problems perceptible and historically intelligible. In doing so, it invites the reappraisal and reimagining of the welfare state rather than its abandonment.

Accessibility Information

Additional accessibility information

  • EPUB 3.0
  • Conforms with the requirements of EPUB Accessibility Spec v1.1
  • WCAG level AA
  • WCAG v2.2 compliant
  • accessibility@bloomsbury.com

Hazards

The publication contains no hazards

Support for non-visual reading

  • No accessibility features offered by the reading system, device or reading software are disabled or otherwise unusable with the product
  • Has alternative text descriptions for images

Visual adjustments

Appearance of the text and page layout can be modified according to the capabilities of the reading system (font family and size, spaces, as well as color of background and text)

Navigation

  • Page list to go to pages from the print source version
  • Elements such as headings, tables, etc for structured navigation
  • All or substantially all textual matter is arranged in a single logical reading order
  • Content is enhanced with ARIA roles to optimize organization and facilitate navigation
  • Purposes of all links are made clear

Rich content

Language tagging provided

Table of Contents

List of Figures
Acknowledgements
1. Poetics of Nordic Noir and Affective Mapping
2. Despondent Families and Dreams of a Good Life
3. Lonely Individuals and Neoliberal Demands
4. Women, Equality, and Gendered Violence
5. Governmental Institutions and Waning Security
6. From Nostalgia to Reassessment of the Past
Conclusions
References
Index

Product details

Bloomsbury Academic Test
Published 29 Apr 2027
Format Ebook (Epub & Mobi)
Edition 1st
Pages 240
ISBN 9798216483090
Imprint Bloomsbury Academic
Illustrations 10 bw illus
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Author

Jaakko Seppälä

Jaakko Seppälä is Lecturer in Film and Television…

Related Titles

Get 30% off in the May sale - for one week only

Environment: Staging