The project will approach the discursive establishment of central research paradigms in the field as discernible in published texts as well as personal communication in the estates of scholars by means of seven case studies. The seven case studies are justified both by the relevance of the paradigms they investigate for Old Norse studies, and by the Setzungen that were influenced by the research paradigms and thus determined and repeatedly changed the objects of study within the discipline.
The PhD projects (P1, 3, 4, 5) and the PostDoc project (P2) all study the Setzung of research paradigms in a certain period. The PostDoc project places a special focus on international and interlingual interferences between different national networks during the same period, and in particular examines Setzungen of the concept of myth through the analysis of different disciplinary discourses and theoretical approaches. The two PIs will contribute with two diachronic case studies (P6 & P7) on the paradigms of author and genre that can be regarded as metaparadigms that have had a great impact on other paradigms in the discipline.
The seven projects cover different periods within the overall project period and partially overlap with each other, as illustrated in Figure 1. This temporal overlap goes along with complex interlacings of the discursive networks that established the individual paradigms as sketched out above and below in the presentation of the individual projects. The discursive networks of the seven part projects are thus closely intertwined in terms of time, places, and people. They are in the following presented in a chronological order (P1–P5), with the overarching diachronic PI projects presented in the end (P6 & P7).
