Henrik Ibsen’s plays came at a critical juncture in late nineteenth-century European culture. Appearing at a time when notions of evolution and heredity were commonplace themes in literature and the arts, Ibsenian drama explored the creative potential offered by contemporary evolutionary thought. As part of a broader context of ideas that tended to wed evolutionary thinking to an ideal of human advancement, degeneration discourse offered a pessimistic counternarrative to belief in progress. In works such as Ghosts, Rosmersholm and Hedda Gabler, Ibsen chronicles the downfall of once-prominent families following the introduction into the family line of degenerative factors. In this presentation I outline how Ibsen’s fascination with degeneration helped him express his criticism of bourgeois morality and formulate a vision of societal renewal which saw women and the working class become custodians of the future.
Henrik Johnsson is an associate professor of Nordic literature at UiT – The Arctic University of Norway. He received his doctoral degree from Stockholm University in 2009 with a dissertation on August Strindberg’s relationship to the literature of the fantastic. His second monograph, The Infinite Coherence: August Strindberg’s Occult Science, was published in 2015. He is co-editor of the anthology The Occult in Modernist Art, Literature, and Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). His research interests focus on Gothic literature and the fantastic, queer literary theory, and the medical humanities, with an emphasis on modern Scandinavian literature.
Please note that this seminar will be live streamed. Registration is mandatory for online participation - please register here on May 23 at the latest. A zoom link will be sent on the day of the seminar.