Literary expedition: Swedish students as discoverers of Bulgarian literature

Bulgarian literature in the distant European North is unknown for both Swedish readers and literary scholars. The ‘real’ readers of our native literature in Sweden are the students, who participate in the courses in Bulgarian at Uppsala University. By analyzing exams, papers, abstracts, analyses, and coursework, written between 2014 and 2017, we can understand how and what they discover in the Bulgarian literature. Their literary expedition suggests that the perception of a literary text is strongly related to the place and time at which it is read. The article argues also that the interpretation of one and the same literary work depends on the readers’ individual situation.