About the project
In the course of the last few decades of the nineteenth century, a significant Norwegian and, more generally, Scandinavian literature arose, and by the turn of the century, the foremost contributions to this literature had already become world literature.
Such an ambition requires an interdisciplinary effort, most crucially between history and literary studies, and that we pay attention to areas which have traditionally fallen outside of the main fields of enquiry within these disciplines. The history of Norwegian literature has been dominated by biographical perspectives and by perspectives informed by the history of ideas.
Objectives
One of the main claims within this tradition has been that the new and modern literature of the nineteenth century was fiercely resisted in Scandinavia, and that it was Ibsen’s break with Norway which created the preconditions for the writing of his so-called ‘social problem plays’.
A main hypothesis in our project was, contrary to this well-established narrative, that it is only possible to grasp the evolution of Ibsen’s authorship when he is understood as part of the emergence of a Danish-Norwegian literary field and within a specific constellation of culture and politics in Scandinavia in the 1870s and ‘80s.
The project studied the mechanisms involved in the internationalisation of Ibsen’s plays, placing particular emphasis on the early English-language reception. A study of the Scandinavian wave within nineteenth-century European literature can supply important perspectives in the ongoing international discussions of world literature, not least in stressing the importance of the periphery.
Financing
The Research Council of Norway