The Penguinisation of Ibsen

This article investigates the current generation of Penguin Ibsen editions, translated by Una Ellis-Fermor and Peter Watts and dating back to the 1950s and ‘60s. It sketches the development of Penguin’s publishing profile, and goes on to consider the role played by Penguin Classics in maintaining Ibsen as a central writer in the Western canon, and, with time, in world literature. By examining paratexts, materiality and translation strategies, the main part of the article considers how these editions construct their particular Ibsens. It looks, among other things, at the organisational principles and the scholarly apparatus. The article concludes by briefly noting some possible ambitions for, as well as challenges facing, a new generation of Penguin Ibsen editions. Except where otherwise indicated, the content of this article is licensed and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited

How was Ibsen's modern drama possible?

One of the major renewals in the history of drama is Henrik Ibsen’s “modern tragedy” of the 1880s and 1890s. Since Ibsen’s own time, this renewal has been seen as an achievement accomplished in spite, rather than because, of Ibsen’s Norwegian and Scandinavian contexts of origin. His origins have consistently been associated with provinciality, backwardness and restrictions to be overcome, and his European “exile” has been seen as the great liberating turning point of his career. We will, on the contrary, argue that throughout his career Ibsen belonged to Scandinavian literature and that his trajectory was fundamentally conditioned and shaped by what happened in the intersection between literature, culture and politics in Scandinavia. In particular, we highlight the continued association and closeness between literature and theatre, the contested language issue in Norway, the superimposition of literary and political cleavages and dynamics as well as the transitory stage of copyright

Fortellingen om en vanskelig slutt

Hvordan bør selvmordet behandles i en biografisk fremstilling? Med utgangspunkt i forfatterens biografi om Jens Bjørneboe reflekteres det over hvordan teksten løser denne utfordringen, og over hvordan biografens poetikk utfordres i møte med denne avslutningen. Det handler ikke minst om å utvikle en skrivepraksis som både tekstog historieteoretisk makter å gi motstand mot retrospektiv reduksjonisme.How should suicide be treated in the writing of biography? With the author's biography of Jens Bjørneboe as a starting point, the article reflects on how the text confronts this challenge, and on how the poetics of the biography is challenged by this particular ending. The article stresses the need for a writing style which, both in text-theoretical and historio-graphical terms, manages to resist retrospective reductionism

"Out of the Ruins: Knut Hamsun's 'idealism' and the inheritance of World War I"

In 1920, the Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun won the Nobel Prize for literature for his novel Markens grøde ( Growth of the Soil) (1917). This article explores some of the key contexts for this work, highlighting the author’s own ambitions, the reasons why he sided with Germany during the war, and his generally völkisch perspectives on the Germanic and Nordic. It furthermore analyses the early reception of this World War I novel, and how it was first subjected to a number of positive readings and seen as an example of idealism, before being appropriated by Nazism

Networks, asymmetries and appropriations: Towards a typology

This article, a revised version of Tore Rem’s keynote lecture at the XIVth International Ibsen Conference in Skien on 5–8 September 2018, draws on pp. 140–174 in Narve Fulsås and Tore Rem, Ibsen, Scandinavia and the Making of a World Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 2018). This version expands on the theoretical-analytical framework of our suggested typology

Knowledge for Sale: Norwegian Encyclopaedias in the Marketplace

Encyclopedias present and contain knowledge, but historically they have also been commercial commodities, produced for sale. In this article, we study the self-presentations of a selection of Norwegian encyclopedias, as these are expressed in the form of commercial images, advertising texts and slogans. We thus present a brief but detailed study of what might be called a number of paratextual matters associated with 20th-century Norwegian encyclopedias, with the aim of identifying the most significant or recurring topoi in the material. Our analysis shows that claims about speed and modernization are among the most conspicuous ingredients in these self-presentations, claims which, we argue, feed into a particular logic of a particular version of 20th-century modernity. The article begins with an analysis of the commercially successful Konversationslexicon, the first Norwegian encyclopedia, published in 1906 and for a long time market leader of the bourgeois tradition. The Konversationslexicon was produced with the explicit aim of providing a source of conversation for the educated classes, a new and expanding group of readers. We also show how the publisher Aschehoug went on to strengthen its own position in this market through a sophisticated process of differentiation. Seen as a contrast to these market leaders, we explore the Norwegian tradition of counter-encyclopaedias, with the radical PaxLeksikon as our main example. This encyclopaedia came into existence as a result of a strong ideological motivation and was run by left-wing idealists. Nevertheless, and perhaps inevitably, it ended up situating itself within the same market mechanisms and the same commercial logic as the bourgeois encyclopaedias. The article ends by a brief consideration of the change from commercial print encyclopaedias to internet-based encyclopaedias, and of the new challenges this poses in a small nation, rhetorically and in the struggle for funding

Det glemte partnerskapet? : Norge og Storbritannia i et nytt århundre

Båndene mellom Norge og Storbritannia er solid forankret – historisk, politisk, økonomisk og kulturelt. Aldri har de omfattet så mange områder som i dag. Paradoksalt nok synes oppmerksomheten omkring det norsk-britiske forholdet å ha gått i motsatt retning. Den norsk-britiske relasjonen som sådan er i dag gjenstand for påfallende lite systematisk oppmerksomhet og kritisk diskusjon. Hva er status for det norsk-britiske forholdet? Hvor går veien videre? Denne boken forsøker å fylle dette kunnskapshullet. Gjennom ti kapitler gir fagpersoner fra norsk statsvitenskap, historie, områdekunnskap og literaturvitenskap et innblikk i sentrale trekk ved det norsk-britiske forholdet. Bokens første del gir en sammenlignende innføring i slektskapet mellom det politiske systemet i de to landene. Kapitlene i andre del går nærmere inn i de utenrikspolitiske relasjonene, fra norsk uavhengighet i 1905 frem til i dag. Bokens tredje og siste del tar for seg spørsmålet om kulturelle og politiske speilbilder og ser på områder hvor Norge og Storbritannia har betydning for hverandre som inspirasjonskilder