Georg Brandes By Bertil Nolin

Georg Brandes (1842-1927) was one of the leading literary critics in Europe of his time. His Main Currents of Nineteenth Century Literature (1872-1890) was a foundational text to the field of comparative literature and extolled by Thomas Mann as the “Bible of the young intellectual Europe at the turn of the century.” Georg Brandes eventually developed into a truly global public intellectual, living by his pen and public lectures. On the eve of World War I, he was one of the most sought-after commentators, vigorously opposing all conflicting factions. This book seeks to understand Brandes’ trajectory, to evaluate Brandes’ significance for current discussions of literary criticism and public engagement, and to introduce Brandes to an international audience. It consists of 15 original chapters commissioned from experts in the field.

Since 1815, Denmark and Britain have lived in peace with each other. From the last half of the 19th century, massive British imports of Danish agricultural products gave Britain a central role in the Danish economy, likewise in the 20th century, British efforts in the two world wars became of crucial importance to Denmark's position in relation to Germany and, later, the Soviet Union. In the same period, the emergence of English as the first foreign language in Denmark facilitated the increasingly closer human and cultural contacts between the two countries. Britain and Denmark, written by Danish and British historians, constitutes the first attempt to provide a comprehensive picture of the roles that these two neighbouring countries have played in the lives of each other during the last two centuries. They are different in size and have had very different global and regional orientations. So, naturally, Britain has always loomed larger in Danish life and politics than the other way round. In many areas, however, relations have been close. The book covers contacts relating to trade, security policies and social and political theory, but also touch on mutual influences within the areas of literature, music, design etc. Most treatments of Danish political and cultural relations with the outside world in this period concentrate on Germany for the period up to 1945, and on the Soviet Union and the USA in the post-war world. In the same way, works on British contemporary history rarely devote much space to relations with the Nordic countries. The aim, therefore, of this book is to provide a supplement, and perhaps corrective, to the existing literature on the international positions of Britain and Denmark in the modern world.

Despite being a minor language, Danish literature is one of the world's most actively translated, and the Scandinavian country is the home of a number of significant writers. Hans Christian Andersen remains one of the most translated authors in the world, philosopher Søren Kierkegaard inspired modern Existentialism, Karen Blixen chronicled her life in colonial Kenya as well as writing imaginary, cosmopolitan tales, and the writers among the circles of literary critic Georg Brandes in the late 19th century were especially important to the further development of European Modernism. Danish Literature as World Literature introduces key figures from 800 years of Danish literature and their impact on world literature. It includes chapters devoted to post-1945 literature on beat and systemic poetry as well as the Scandinavia noir vogue that includes both crime fiction and cinema and is enjoying worldwide popularity.

This study is among the first works in English to comprehensively address the Scandinavian First World War experience in the larger international context of the war. It surveys the complex relationship between the belligerent great powers and Northern Europe's neutral small states in times of crisis and war. The book's overreaching rationale draws upon three underlying conceptual fields: neutrality and international law, hegemony and great power politics as well as diplomacy and policy-making of small states in the international arena. From a variety of angles, it examines the question of how neutrality was understood and perceived, negotiated and dealt with both among the Scandinavian states and the belligerent major powers, especially Britain, Germany and Russia. For a long time, the experience of neutral countries during the First World War was seen as marginal, and was overshadowed by the experiences of occupation and collaboration brought about by the Second World War. In this book, Jonas demonstrates how this perception has changed, with neutrality becoming an integral part of the multiple narratives of the First World War. It is an important contribution to the international history of the First World War, cultural-historically influenced approaches to diplomatic history and the growing area of neutrality studies.

A major biography of one of the most important figures in modern drama, evoked through a biographical reading of his plays Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen achieved unparalleled success in his lifetime and remains one of the most important figures in modern drama. The culmination of a lifetime of scholarship, Evert Sprinchorn's biography constructs Ibsen's life through a biographical reading of his plays with provocative and insightful analyses of his works, placing them and their author within the social, political, and intellectual foment of nineteenth-century Europe. This thought-provoking book will captivate anyone interested in the history of drama and the foundations of modernism.

With the words ?A new manifestation of art was ... expected, necessary, inevitable,? Jean Mor? announced the advent of the Symbolist movement in 1886. When Symbolist artists began experimenting in order to invent new visual languages appropriate for representing modern life in all its complexity, they set the stage for innovation in twentieth-century art. Rejecting what they perceived as the superficial descriptive quality of Impressionism, Naturalism, and Realism, Symbolist artists delved beneath the surface to express feelings, ideas, scientific processes, and universal truths. By privileging intangible concepts over perceived realities and by asserting their creative autonomy, Symbolist artists broke with the past and paved the way for the heterogeneity and penchant for risk-taking that characterizes modern art. The essays collected here, which consider artists from France to Russia and Finland to Greece, argue persuasively that Symbolist approaches to content, form, and subject helped to shape twentieth-century Modernism. Well-known figures such as Kandinsky, Khnopff, Matisse, and Munch are considered alongside lesser-known artists such as Fini, Gyzis, Koen, and Vrubel in order to demonstrate that Symbolist art did not constitute an isolated moment of wild experimentation, but rather an inspirational point of departure for twentieth-century developments.

Le Danois Georg Brandes (1842-1927), considéré comme l'un des pères de la littérature comparée, exerça, en tant que critique littéraire, une influence déterminante sur son époque. Il fut également un intellectuel engagé, défendant la liberté individuelle et le droit des peuples à disposer d'eux-mêmes, ainsi que la cause de la paix pendant la Première guerre mondiale. Les pays qu'il connaissait le mieux, et où il avait les plus nombreux contacts, étaient la France, l'Allemagne et l'Angleterre. Les relations que Brandes entretenait avec ces pays ont été au centre de la Deuxième Conférence Internationale Georg Brandes (Nancy, 2008), dont les contributions sont rassemblées dans ce volume. La provenance des auteurs (France, Danemark, Italie, Allemagne, Suède, Grande Bretagne, Etats-Unis, Tchéquie...) témoigne de la dimension internationale de l'entreprise. La présence, aux côtés des meilleurs spécialistes de Brandes, de représentants de disciplines autres que les études scandinaves (littérature française, allemande, anglaise, philosophie, histoire, etc.) reflète la diversité et la richesse de l'oeuvre brandésienne. The Danish writer Georg Brandes (1842-1927) is regarded as one of the founders of comparative literature. As a literary critic, he was highly influential in his time. He was also a politically engaged intellectual, advocating individual freedom and peoples' right to self-government; he also refused to take sides during the First World War and opposed warfare. The countries he knew best and where he had most friends and correspondents were France, Germany and Britain. Brandes' relationship to those countries was the subject of the Second International Georg Brandes Conference held in Nancy (France) in November 2008. The papers that were delivered there are collected in this book. The authors are from various countries (France, Denmark, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Great Britain, USA, Czech Republic...), stressing the international dimension of their research. The presence of the best Brandes' specialists as well as of scholars from various fields other than Scandinavian studies (French, German, English literature, philosophy, history, etc.) shows the diversity and richness in Brandes' work.