The Emotive Textualities of Wilhelm Jensen’s Karin von Schweden

This article traces the emotive textuality in Wilhelm Jensen’s (1837–1911) Karin von Schweden (1872), which is an anomaly in the author’s expansive oeuvre of over 160 prose works in that it is one of his very few literary successes. Drawing on work in cognitive literary theory and emotion studies, the essay identifies emotive textualities in (1) the text’s emphasis on characters’ interiority through an extensive interest in fostering readerly attribution of thoughts, emotions, and motivations to actions of fictive characters (or, Theory of Mind, as cognitive sciences call the process), and (2) the text’s emphasis on facilitating readerly empathetic alignment with figures. The goal is to use the emotive textuality as a way to situate Jensen’s text in the context of sentimental fiction and the author’s personal populist style.