American studies in the scholarly sense are old in Europe. But academic chairs and research institutions were late in developing, as they were in the United States themselves. In most European universities the subject was firmly established only after the Second World War.

The University of Oslo in Norway in 1946 founded a full professorship of American literature, the first of its kind in Scandinavia, and in 1948 an American Institute. In the following year the Institute started a series of book publications in cooperation with the University of Pennsylvania. This is the second of two volumes titled Americana Norvegica.