Mitt i stridsvimlet

Amid the Heat of Battle. Modernism, Fascism and the Values of Literature in the Interwar Period This article deals with Finland-Swedish modernism during the interwar years (1920’s and 1930’s) from a historical and conceptual perspective. Activist modernists such as Hagar Olsson, Elmer Diktonius, and Örnulf Tigerstedt questioned the liberal, humanist values of the cultural establishment, and put forward an ars militans. Their literary works were often read against the background of their cultural politics, but as recent research has shown, the works often point in a different direction, and their relations to the cultural politics of their authors were indirect or even contradictory. Though many of their works do not put forward new values in any straightforward sense, the article argues for the importance of reading their form dialectically against their sociohistorical background. The article also considers unconscious social motivation and different value paradigms within modernism, and argues that the best way of understanding the values of Finland-Swedish modernism is to consider the dialectics between the form of the works and their sociohistorical context in relation to the emerging value regime of liberal capitalism.