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The 1872 Introduction to Hovedstr⊘mninger i det 19de Aarhundredes Litteratur (Main Currents of Nineteenth-Century Literature)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Georg Brandes  and
Lynn R. Wilkinson
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Extract

From Comparative Literature to Cultural Renewal: Georg Brandes's 1872 Introduction to Main Currents of Nineteenth-Century Literature

“The only literature that is alive today is one that provokes debate.” These words ring out in the first published version of a lecture Georg Brandes gave at the University of Copenhagen on 3 November 1871. The lecture was the introduction to a series that changed the course not only of his life but also of Scandinavian and European cultural history. Born in Copenhagen in 1842 to assimilated Jewish parents, Brandes had recently completed a dissertation on French aesthetics and literary criticism and hoped that his lecture series would allow him to replace Carsten Hauch as professor of aesthetics at the university. Brilliant and iconoclastic, the lectures also responded to the Danish defeat in the 1864 war with Prussia, portraying Danish literature and culture as morbidly inward and insular. Brandes urged his countrymen to look abroad, to traditions such as the French, whose literature included many notable writers who grappled with social and political issues, especially those who came of age during the revolutions of 1789 and 1830.

Type
Criticism in Translation
Information
PMLA , Volume 132 , Issue 3 , May 2017 , pp. 696 - 705
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 The Modern Language Association of America

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References

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