A reception study of Maja Lunde's The History of Bees in Norway, the English-speaking countries and Romania

Abstract

This master thesis examines the reception of Maja Lunde’s novel "The History of Bees" in three linguistic areas: Norway, Romania and the English-speaking countries. By following the journey of the novel from the publication in Norwegian to becoming an international bestseller, I aim to investigate the main factors that shape the flow of the book translation through the transnational literary field and the implications for its reception. Using the theoretical framework developed in the field of sociology of literature by Pierre Bourdieu, Pascale Casanova and Johan Heilbron, this thesis follows the transition of a debut novel written in a peripheral language (Norwegian) to the core of the transnational literary field. My study shows that before the ultimate consecration of the novel in English, the hyper-central language in the world literary field, the novel passed through the regional German language market. Afterwards, the consecration of the novel in the literary centers of the world literary field influenced the reception of the novel in other peripheral markets, such as the Romanian one. This paper also addresses the aspect of genre, recurrent in the media coverage of the novel. Although the reviews do not extensively mention the label “climate fiction”, "The History of Bees" is widely understood from the perspective of this new category of literature.