The Novels Of August Strindberg

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1968.

Plays by August Strindberg, Second series by August Strindberg Strindberg was fifty years old when he wrote "There Are Crimes and Crimes." In the same year, 1899, he produced three of his finest historical dramas: "The Saga of the Folkungs," "Gustavus Vasa," and "Eric XIV." Just before, he had finished "Advent," which he described as "A Mystery," and which was published together with "There Are Crimes and Crimes" under the common title of "In a Higher Court." Back of these dramas lay his strange confessional works, "Inferno" and "Legends," and the first two parts of his autobiographical dream-play, "Toward Damascus"-all of which were finished between May, 1897, and some time in the latter part of 1898. And back of these again lay that period of mental crisis, when, at Paris, in 1895 and 1896, he strove to make gold by the transmutation of baser metals, while at the same time his spirit was travelling through all the seven hells in its search for the heaven promised by the great mystics of the past. We are delighted to publish this classic book as part of our extensive Classic Library collection. Many of the books in our collection have been out of print for decades, and therefore have not been accessible to the general public. The aim of our publishing program is to facilitate rapid access to this vast reservoir of literature, and our view is that this is a significant literary work, which deserves to be brought back into print after many decades. The contents of the vast majority of titles in the Classic Library have been scanned from the original works. To ensure a high quality product, each title has been meticulously hand curated by our staff. Our philosophy has been guided by a desire to provide the reader with a book that is as close as possible to ownership of the original work. We hope that you will enjoy this wonderful classic work, and that for you it becomes an enriching experience.

August Strindberg, a Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist, and painter, is regarded as the "father" of modern Swedish literature. He authored over 60 plays and 30 works of fiction, autobiography, history, cultural analysis, and politics in his four-decade career, often drawing on his personal experiences. Strindberg's pioneering style of dramatic action, language, and visual composition can be traced back to his earliest work. This autobiography of his, 'The Son of a Servant,' is an exploration of his life, from his humble beginnings as the son of a poor servant to his eventual rise to fame as a prominent writer.

"I'll tell you what, Ygberg, I believe one has to be very unscrupulous if one wants to get on in the world." That's how The Red Room could be summarised through one of its sentences. Through a number of cultural workers Strindberg asks the question of how life should be lived. As a young person, you can pretend to be an ardent idealist; as an older, somewhat sober person, you can come to realise that what you from the beginning thought to be idealistic may not really be. Through its straightforward language The Red Room (1879) is often called the first modern novel in Swedish. It constitutes a representation of Stockholm in the 1870s and is known for its depictions of the urban environment as well as its satire. The book is an attempt to stand by the lower classes by humorously attacking the hypocrisy of the higher classes. The Red Room was described as dirt by contemporary critics, but it was an immediate success. This edition of The Red Room constitutes the first novel in the cluster text style, which could be 20 percent better than ordinary texts, and is intended to function as a kind of survey for how we look at text, reading and book design. This book, in Swedish, was made as an entry for Svensk bokkonst, which every year rewards good examples of book design. The winners get to participate in Stiftung Buchkunt's Best Book Design from all over the World which in German is called Schönste Bücher aus aller Welt. This difference captures an important gap. Book design has long been about designing beautiful books. Now we'll see how Svensk bokkonst and possibly Stiftung Buchkunst see this. What do you think? Should we read cluster texts? You will get an answer to that question by reading this edition of The Red Room. PLEASE NOTE that the text in this book, i.e. cluster text, cannot be reflown and therefore needs to be read on tablets/screens at least 13 centimetres wide, which can handle line lengths of 95 characters (i.e. smaller screens are not suitable).

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1968.

Reproduction of the original: The Inferno by August Strindberg

"[...]DOES hold us, even when we regret his power of doing so. And no one familiar with the conclusions of modern psychology could imagine such a paradox possible did not the object of our sorely divided feelings provide us with something that our minds instinctively recognise as true to life in some way, and for that reason valuable to the art of living. There are so many ways of presenting truth. Strindberg's is only one of them-and not the one commonly employed nowadays. Its main fault lies perhaps in being too intellectual, too abstract. For while Strindberg was intensely emotional, and while this fact colours all his writings, he could only express himself through his reason. An emotion that would move another [...]".

What starts out as an account of a humdrum administrative assignment is elevated to an existential examination of the meaning of life in Swedish author August Strindberg's novel On the Seaboard. A bureaucrat is sent to a remote island outpost with the task of educating the local fishermen about advances in fishing techniques, but he is unprepared for the pushback he receives from the staunchly traditional community.