Mobility Tales: Rural-Urban and Urban-Rural Migration in Danish Literature

Postdoctoral project by Christian Steentofte Andersen, Junior Investigator.

Christian Steentofte Andersen’s research is driven by a curiosity about how literature can help us understand the social dimensions of large-scale societal change. He is particularly interested in how the study of literary fiction can shed light on the everyday consequences and cultural narratives shaped by global capitalism, gentrification, the rural–urban divide, and the wider rise in geographical inequality.

His project examines how Danish literature from the 1970s to today has depicted the movement of people, things, and ideas between countryside and city. He explores what motivates such movements, how they are experienced, and how rural and urban places are continuously reshaped through mobility.

As he explains: 

Focusing on connections between the countryside and the city, I want to challenge their supposed opposition by arguing that these places make up a spatial and societal continuum wherein questions of culture, class, identity, and power are constantly negotiated.

Christian works with both contemporary and historical literary sources that capture experiences of place and mobility on a sensorial and subjective level. Literature, he argues, not only mirrors social realities but also intervenes in the narratives through which we perceive urbanisation and migration. His readings highlight marginalized perspectives — such as those of working-class women — that have often been overlooked in dominant accounts of transition.

His research includes contemporary novels that portray urban–rural migration, sometimes referred to as “counter-urbanism,” such as Thomas Boberg’s Insula (2024) and Malte Tellerup’s Hedeselskabet (2022). Alongside this, he turns to earlier works like Kirsten Thorup’s novels to examine how women from the post-war generation experienced rural-to-urban migration during the rise of the Danish welfare state in the 1960s–1980s.