Knut Hamsun's Criticism of Shakespeare

Result code in IS VaVaI
<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F00216208%3A11210%2F22%3A10455458" target="_blank" >RIV/00216208:11210/22:10455458 - isvavai.cz</a>
Result on the web
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DOI - Digital Object Identifier
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Result language
angličtina
Original language name
Knut Hamsun's Criticism of Shakespeare
Original language description
The Nobel Prize winner Knut Hamsun (1859-1952) is often regarded as Norway's greatest prose writer. This article analyzes his statements on Shakespeare from his essays and lectures from around 1890. The 1880s were the heyday of Realism and Naturalism in Norway, and Hamsun was trying to make space for a different type of literature which he himself called ʻpsychologicalʼ and which one nowadays often sees as early modernist. In his attacks on some of the great authors of his time, as well as canonical writers of previous centuries, he criticizes Shakespeare, among others, and claims that Shakespeare's characters are extremely flat. Some of Hamsun's arguments are crude, superficial and amusing, but his statements nonetheless constitute an interesting case of Shakespeare reception. This article shows that some of the Norwegian writer's pronouncements about Shakespeare are in accord with his proto-modernist literary programme. In addition, the article compares his disparaging remarks with those of two other detractors of Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy and G. B. Shaw, and concludes that Hamsun and Shaw share the same strategy: they use scandalous statements about Shakespeare in order to shake contemporary readers and gain their own place in the sun.
Czech name
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Czech description
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Project
<a href="/en/project/EF16_019%2F0000734" target="_blank" >EF16_019/0000734: Creativity and Adaptability as Conditions of the Success of Europe in an Interrelated World</a><br>
Continuities
P - Projekt vyzkumu a vyvoje financovany z verejnych zdroju (s odkazem do CEP)

Publication year
2022
Confidentiality
S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Book/collection name
Disseminating Shakespeare in the Nordic Countries: Shifting Centres and Peripheries in the Nineteenth Century
ISBN
978-1-350-20086-9
Number of pages of the result
21
Pages from-to
269-289
Number of pages of the book
324
Publisher name
Bloomsbury
Place of publication
Londýn
UT code for WoS chapter
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