In Sweden from the 1990s onwards, Gothic has invaded all cultural registers – highbrow literature, feature film, popular culture, children's books and young-adult fiction. Furthermore, it has been well received by audiences and critics both inside and outside the country. Most works are produced in response to the international tradition of Gothic with references to international classics and iconic works produced outside Scandinavia. In that way, Swedish Gothic upholds a long domestic tradition of densely intertextual Gothic that goes back to the Romantic period and the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Still, Swedish Gothic is a rather unexplored subject in the field of Gothic studies. One reason for this neglect is the global predominance of the Anglo-American tradition and scholarly studies dedicated to it. Another explanation is the strong realism-prone literary practice in Sweden; Gothic texts with self-conscious unrealism, anxiety-provoking imaginary and a mode of revealing something unconscious or supernatural have not met the requirements as highbrow literature until the late twentieth century. As Rosemary Jackson writes about fantastic art in general, Swedish Gothic has been ignored by native literary critics who have been engaged with ‘establishment ideals rather than with subverting them’. It was first in the 1990s that the existence of Gothic fiction was systematically examined in a number of studies by Yvonne Leffler. Since the millennium, scholars such as Mattias Fyhr, Sofia Wijkmark and Henrik Johnsson have studied different writers and aspects of Swedish Gothic. Most of the early studies have been dealing with nineteenth-century literature and canonised writers, such as August Strindberg and Selma Lagerlöf. In the last decades, there has been a growing interest in other cultural forms and Gothic stories in different media, such as film, rock music and young-adult fiction. Drawing on these studies, this chapter will give a survey of Swedish Gothic from the early nineteenth century until the present moment.

The Rise of Swedish Gothic

By the end of the eighteenth century, many of the first English, German and French Gothic novels were imported, available for sale and possible to borrow from commercial libraries in Sweden. In addition, some of them were quickly translated into Swedish. For example, Matthew Lewis's The Monk (1796) was published in Swedish in 1800–04. Five novels by Ann Radcliffe were available in Swedish between 1800 and 1806, among them The Mystery of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797).