This study is a comparative examination of Swedish cultural practice including literature, museum displays, photography, and film at the turn of the twentieth century that remodeled observers as ecological subjects. The use of literary and visual media to provide an overview and survey of Sweden's nature and natural landscape has been well documented, but this study attempts to recover an "ecological imaginary" in these representational strategies that emphasized the importance the subject's interrelatedness to the physical (and, most especially, the natural) environments. I begin by considering the renaissance of interest in Carl Linnaeus and his re-invention as an artistic and literary figure in Sweden in the years leading up to the bicentennial of his birth in 1907. At this time, literary historians and critics (most notably Oscar Levertin) sought to counter the notion of Linnaeus as an objective, detached scientist with an image of the famous naturalist as an embodied subject in intimate contact with the natural world. The reinvented image of Linnaeus, which combined the figuration of an objective scientist with that of an embodied subjective artist, provided both a model of modern engagement with the natural environment as well as a historical precedent for Swedish culture's own interest in representations of nature.;The subsequent chapters consider the emergence of an ecological sensibility in turn-of-the-century Sweden that combined objective surveys and overviews with an emphasis on the subjective experience of landscape. Examples such as Stockholm's Biological Museum, Selma Lagerlof's Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige, the photographic collections of the Svenska Turistforeningen, early Swedish actuality films, and Swedish narrative cinema from the mid-1910s, demonstrate how competing visual modalities were combined to work out new configurations of an increasingly dispersed sense of subjectivity. The figuration of the individual subject's embedded relationship within the natural landscape presented in media from literature to film in this period revised Cartesian definitions of ahistorical subjectivity by reinscribing the importance of time and place in the definition of both individual as well as collective identity.
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