Abstract
Based on the prognosis of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wolfgang Iser explores the issue of co-existence of distinctive cultures in the 21st century. He states that the arrival of any cultural entity treated as foreign has capabilities to expand the domestic culture.
Recent boom of Scandinavian detective stories raises the question of transformations and shifts of meanings as these stories arrive into a non-Scandinavian cultural context. The essay traces the origins of the Scandinavian detective invasion (mainly via "lighter" genres of Swedish literature) and offers two case study analyses.
The first one focuses on "crime novels" by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, the second compares the Swedish and Czech reviews of The Girl in the Spider's Web by David Lagercrantz. While the evaluative approaches do not show any striking differences, the readings apparently differ: The Swedish reception is based on the domestic aspects of local cultural tradition and social context, the Czech reading pays attention to global factors, intertextual relations to other national literatures and to the anatomy of Scandinavian/Swedish detective story.
Such global and locally specific concerns can be hardly found in the Swedish reception. Such a contrast allows a generalization that the Swedish response focuses on the content of the social critique while the Czech response focuses on the form of the text, particularly the genre.