Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature

Introduction

Brandes gave these lectures at the University of Copenhagen from 1871 and published them in six volumes between 1872 and 1890. They survey European literature in the first half of the nineteenth century – the émigré literature of the French Revolution, German Romanticism, the reaction in France, English naturalism, the Romantic school in France and Young Germany – as a struggle between reaction and freedom. The opening lecture called on Danish literature to bring problems up for discussion and became the manifesto of the “Modern Breakthrough”. The lectures caused a scandal in Copenhagen, made Brandes known throughout Europe and influenced writers from Ibsen to the younger generation of Scandinavian authors.

More works by Georg Brandes

• 1889Aristocratic Radicalism