Book Description

Prominent Scandinavian authors from the end of the 19th century struggled with the classical themes of myth and religion, and the modern concepts of Freud and Darwin. The reconciliation of these counterpoints in the work of Norway's Henrik Ibsen, Sweden's August Stringbberg and Denmark's J P Jacobsen, forms the core of this analysis. Incorporating Diderot's definition of theatricality in painting, this study shows the tension between the image and a concomitant distrust of its reality in three of Ibsen's plays: A Doll's House; Ghosts; and The Wild Duck. Investigating the mythical patterns beneath the text, Osterud suggests that Ibsen's naturalist drama is two-fold: a clash between the sacred (myth, allegory and ritual performance) and avant-garde (utopian visions and transgressive acts). Probing Strindberg's 'The Black Glove', the book demonstrates that this challenging re-telling of the Nativity story creates a modern version of a medieval ritual drama, whereby the logic of place overrides the logic of chronology in the traditional theatre of naturalism. Jacobsen's novella 'Mogens' was said to introduce naturalism into Denmark. Osterud confronts the usual query concerning the balance between Jacobsen as a Darwinist scholar and as a fiction writer. He concludes that, rather than seeing nature as an explanation of the author's narrative, nature is an unsolved riddle to which religion and Dawinism give competing answers, creating a hermeneutic dialogue within the text.