Fredrik RenardResearcher

About me

I am a postdoctoral research fellow in German and Comparative Literature with a PhD from Stockholm University and Justus-Liebig-Universität, Giessen. My research addresses questions in historical narratology, genre theory, and literary theory, with a focus on European literature from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, often employing a comparative approach. I am particularly interested in the novel as both a historical form and a theoretical object: on one hand, how the emergence and development of the novel generated new ways of seeing and narrating the world against the backdrop of the cultural and societal upheavals brought about by modernity; on the other, how the novel—from Goethe and Hegel to Bakhtin and Lukács—has served as a constant source for theories about how the nature of modernity is to be understood. This focus has led to, among other things, a dissertation on the emergence of the modern German novel in the eighteenth century (later revised into a book) and several articles on narrative issues related to novelistic storytelling and novel theory. To provide a platform for discussing such questions with other researchers in Sweden, I co-founded the research group Narratio.

In my dissertation, Arbeit am Zufall. Die Formierung des modernen deutschen Romans im 18. Jahrhundert, I examined how the German novel becomes modern through its treatment of chance and randomness. As I conceptualize it, chance is both a question of the individual's ability to meaningfully shape their life in a world devoid of belief in a higher order and a matter of the novel’s own form (or formlessness). This dual perspective has been overlooked in previous research, which has often focused on chance as a mimetic or narrative-technical issue. The starting point for the dissertation is that the novel aspiring to be modern must simultaneously come to terms with a secular reality governed by chance and address the formlessness inherited from its generic predecessors as well as its (non-)position within the classical genre system. My thesis is that the novel, unlike canonized genres whose forms were defined through the steady stream of poetological treatises following Aristotle's Poetics, determines its form internally, as part of what it is about. What I term "work on chance" describes how the modern novel gives itself form by theorizing and narrativizing randomness in various ways. In this context, chance is both what must be shaped within the novel and the inexhaustible potential that makes the modern novel perpetually renewable. The dissertation was awarded a scholarship from the Stina and Erik Lundberg Foundation by the Swedish Academy.

My current research project, The Narrative Forms of Experience, aims to develop a new theory of the narration of experience in the modern European novel of the long nineteenth century. In this project, I draw on Walter Benjamin’s conceptual pair Erlebnis and Erfahrung and Monika Fludernik’s theory of experientiality to analyze novelistic narratives as forms of structured experience. This approach allows for a dynamic and embodied understanding of narrative structures while freeing the novel from interpretations rooted in epochal concepts (such as Enlightenment, Romanticism, Realism, and Modernism). The project is funded by the Swedish Research Council (VR) and includes a collaboration with Stefano Ercolino at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, where I was a visiting researcher from August 2022 to June 2023.

Publications

Renard, Fredrik, “After Negation: Bildung and Modernist Form from Death in Venice to The Magic Mountain,” forthcoming in Modernism/modernity, vol. 32, no. 2 (2026) [preliminary date].

Renard, Fredrik, “The Circumstantial View of Life: Narrative and the Novelistic Peripeteia,” forthcoming in Poetics Today, vol. 46, no. 2 (2025).

Renard, Fredrik, “The Moment Unbound: When Romance Broke Free From Epic,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 51, no. 2 (2025), 268–289.

Renard, Fredrik, Review of Isabelle Stålh, Psykets Laboratorium: drogexperiment i Weimarrepubliken, Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap, vol. 23, no. 4 (2023), 216-221.

Renard, Fredrik, “The Homelessness of the Novel: Friedrich Blanckenburg’s Novel Poetics,” New Literary History, vol. 54, no. 2 (2023), 1169–1191.

Renard, Fredrik, “‘Außerhalb unserem kleinen Horizont’: Christoph Martin Wieland’s Geschichte des Agathon as World Literature.” Nünning, A. & Polland, I., The Cultural Work of Fictions: Trajectories of Literary Studies in the 21st Century. Trier: WVT (2021), 175–191.

Renard, Fredrik, Arbeit am Zufall: Die Formierung des modernen deutschen Romans im 18. Jahrhundert, Berlin: J.B. Metzler (2021).

Renard, Fredrik, “Effi Briest and the Work on Genre: Transformation through Reduction,” Orbis Litterarum, vol. 75 (2020), 173–183.