Knowra Georg Brandes Georg Brandes Georg Brandes (1842–1927) was a Danish literary critic and scholar whose lectures and essays helped shape modern Scandinavian literature and introduced Friedrich Nietzsche’s ideas to a wider European audience.
Friedrich Nietzsche : A German philosopher whose critiques of morality, religion, and culture influenced modern thought. Brandes’s 1888 lectures on Nietzsche helped bring the philosopher’s work to wider attention.
Modern Breakthrough : A Scandinavian literary movement that challenged inherited social, religious, and political conventions in the late nineteenth century. Brandes’s 1871 lectures supplied the movement with its influential call to debate contemporary problems.
Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature : Georg Brandes’s multivolume survey of European literature from the French Revolution onward. This major work develops his comparative account of literature responding to modern ideas.
Scandinavian literature : Literature produced in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and related Nordic language communities. Brandes helped Scandinavian writers gain attention beyond their national readerships.
Henrik Ibsen : A Norwegian playwright whose realistic dramas examine social conventions, power, and individual freedom. Brandes championed Ibsen as part of the modern literary movement he helped define.
European realism : A nineteenth-century literary movement that portrayed contemporary social life with attention to ordinary experience and material conditions. Brandes promoted realist writing as a means of confronting modern society.
The Modern Breakthrough (lectures) : A series of lectures Georg Brandes delivered at the University of Copenhagen in 1871 on recent European literature. These lectures launched his campaign to bring literature into open debate about social problems.
Naturalism (literature) : A literary movement that depicts human behavior as shaped by heredity, environment, and material conditions. Brandes’s call to address social problems helped prepare the ground for naturalist writing.
August Strindberg : A Swedish playwright and novelist known for psychologically intense works and experiments in dramatic form. Brandes’s criticism engaged with Strindberg and the conflicts of modern Scandinavian literature.
Johan Ludvig Heiberg : A Danish poet, playwright, and critic who shaped Copenhagen’s literary culture in the first half of the nineteenth century. Heiberg represents the established Danish literary tradition against which Brandes’s program took shape.
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