Transnational Imagi(ni)sm: Borealism and the Avant-Gardes

The emergence of the Avant-gardes at the turn of the twentieth century brought with it a transformation of the Nordic pastoral tradition, remodelled as resolutely modern poetics, which we propose to consider under the name Boreal Imaginism. We will examine different avant-garde movements, the fashioning of their names and their aesthetic projects, which will allow us to theorise Boreal Imaginism in a transnational perspective: Anglo-American Imagism theorised by Ezra Pound in his 1912 manifesto, as a poetic movement founded on the creation of images in the form of visual snapshots, epitomised by Wallace Stevens's poem "The Snow Man"; the Russian Imagism of the 1910s and 20s; the Imaginisterna, a group formed by Swedish artists C.O. Hulten, Max Walter Svanberg and Anders Osterlin between 1945 and 1955; Le Mouvement International pour un Bauhaus imaginiste developed by the Danish artist Asger Jorn in 1954; and Christian Dotremont's "Imagineiges". At the intersection of these different avantgarde movements, the concept of a Boreal Imagism will allow us to theorise the reworking of traditional boreal tropes through an aesthetic experimentation that is resolutely modernist. In the context of the current debate on ecocriticism and nature writing, this article will seek to explore the possible lines of transmission between the historical avant-gardes and the post-WWII Nordic experimental movements.