Denmark - Culture - Literature

Denmark
4. Culture
4.7 Literature

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4.7.1 Before Writing
4.7.2 The Oldest Written Work
4.7.3 The Middle Ages
4.7.4 Literature in the Vernacular
4.7.5 The Renaissance
4.7.6 The Baroque
4.7.7 The Transition to the Enlightenment - Man at the Centre
4.7.8 The Enlightenment
4.7.9 Pre-Romanticism
4.7.10 Romanticism and "the Golden Age"
4.7.11 A New Reality is Established
4.7.12 The Modern Breakthrough
4.7.13 Symbolism and Fin-de-Siècle Literature
4.7.14 The Popular Breakthrough
4.7.15 The Inter-War Period
4.7.16 The Heretica Period
4.7.17 Post-War Modernism and Traditionalism
4.7.18 The Public and Privatisation
4.7.19 Mythologies, Post-Modernism and New Inventive Writing
4.7.20 Biographies

Before Writing [top]

The great stories of creation, of gods and human beings, of ragnarok (the twilight of the gods) and the new earth and the new heaven were composed long before the earliest written accounts. From pictures on small metal plates, bracteates, found in recent years, we know that Scandinavian mythology was fully developed and recited as long ago as the 5th century BC. This is common Nordic material that was only written down in Iceland soon after 1200 AD (in the Edda) and then between 1190 and 1210 (often in quite distorted form) by the Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus. But it is these mythical stories that form the roots of Danish/Nordic culture. It is a metaphorical universe to which later literature - from Pre-Romanticism onwards - returns time after time, retelling and interpreting. And in the Grundtvigian folk high schools the stories of the ancient gods and giants have for over a hundred years played their part in moulding the broad sweep of popular culture. Although the myths had religious subject matter, they must be seen as the oldest collection of stories, a metaphorical universe that helped create a Danish and Scandinavian identity.

The Oldest Written Work [top]

The runic inscriptions, mainly from the Viking Age, are like an open book in the Danish countryside. Several of the great runic stones are still freely accessible, subjected to wind and weather, more or less where they have stood for a thousand years. They are not really literature in a narrow sense, but the runic inscriptions are the oldest written documents in Denmark. Lapidary in form, sometimes containing alliteration and a little rhythm, they usually only contain information about a dead warrior and about the man who wrote the runes, but they can also contain invocations and magic and the names of people and gods. The Jelling Stones are the great national treasure, the larger of the two, with its figure of Christ and heathen ornamentation, containing Harald Bluetooth's declaration that he united Denmark and made the Danes Christian.

The discovery in 1639 and 1734 of the two golden horns, with their ornamentation and the runic inscription on the shorter of the two, had far-reaching literary consequences - not least thanks to Adam Oehlenschläger's Romantic programme poem Guldhornene (The Golden Horns), written after the theft of the horns in 1802. The poem attained the status of literary mythology and was later part of the stuff of general culture.

The Middle Ages [top]

Monastery and Church; Literature in Latin

The Middle Ages were the great age of manuscripts. The Catholic monasteries were the vehicles of literary culture, which by dint of the Latin language and the studies which the learned prelates undertook abroad was an international culture. It was in this framework that the first great work of Danish literature was written, Saxo's history of Denmark, Gesta Danorum (The Deeds of the Danes), a description of events under the Danish kings from the earliest legendary history up to the time at which the book was written (immediately after 1200 AD). This is a work of literature of European format, written in late silver age Latin. It is the oldest written foundation for a Danish identity, fashioned by an international culture. As to the most ancient material, this is a goldmine, a free adaptation of legend and myth. Saxo is a main source for the works of later ages, both in Denmark and abroad (e.g. the Hamlet legend).

Alongside Saxo's prose there is another monumental work in Latin, Anders Sunesen's Hexaëmeron (The Six Days), written perhaps around 1200 or possibly between 1223 and the death of Anders Sunesen in 1228. This, too, is a literary achievement of international stature, a didactic hexameter poem about the Creation and a theological-allegorical interpretation of what was created. A subtle and profoundly learned work and a distillation of mediaeval Catholicism's view of the world. Anders Sunesen was Absalon's successor as Archbishop of Lund, and the man to whom Saxo, on completing his own work about 1220, dedicated his foreword. Hexaëmeron was first printed as late as 1892 and translated into Danish verse in 1985.

Literature in the Vernacular [top]

Side by side with Latin literature there is also a mediaeval literature in the vernacular. As linguistic monuments the regional laws (Jutlandic Law, Zealand Law, Scanian Law) are of special interest, and they are also important as sources of cultural history.

Ballads are the principal mediaeval literature in the vernacular. There are but few scattered bits of evidence of the ballads from the Middle Ages themselves, but by the time of the Renaissance they were already being written down in the poetry albums of ladies of the aristocracy. How old the ballads are has been the subject of widely divergent views, but it must be supposed that most of them stem from about the middle of the 14th century and up to the end of the 15th century. The fairy-tale-like ballads of magic and the novel-like ballads of chivalry constituting the major part of the ballads that have been handed down to us, often have a considerable literary value through their sharply defined and genuinely tragic conflicts or their boisterous humour, and through the emotive refrains with which they are all provided. In an international context the Danish ballad tradition is remarkable for its relatively homogeneous character, its very early redactions and finally because Denmark is the country that can boast of the oldest printed editions of the ballads (Anders Sørensen Vedel's Hundredvisebog (Book of a Hundred Ballads) 1591, Mette Gjøe's Tragica 1657 and Peder Syv's edition of 1695. These printed editions have kept the ballads alive in an oral - and later written - tradition until far into the 19th century. When the ballads were rediscovered by the Romantics they exerted an enormous influence on the poetical language throughout the 19th century and inspired a host of imitations and re-creations. And from that time the ballads were an essential element in the Danish literary identity.

The Renaissance [top]

Both the manuscript literature (which circulated in hand-written copies) and the Latin literature continued throughout the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. But the Renaissance meant the breakthrough of the printed book (16th century, continuing into the 17th century). It was the age of learned works (the historian Anders Sørensen Vedel, the speculative doctor Petrus Severinus alias Peder Sørensen, famous throughout Europe, the astronomer Tycho Brahe and others). But as the Renaissance and the Lutheran Reformation were contemporary with each other, it was principally the age of Bible translations and hymn writing. The hymns of the new church were given a standard edition in Hans Thomesen's Hymn Book of 1569. Most of the hymns here were adaptations and translations from German, but by the end of the century the Reformation had found its first Danish poet in Hans Christensen Sthen (En liden Vandrebog - A Little Book for Wanderers - c. 1590, a prayer book containing a number of original hymns). Several of Sthen's hymns, their simple tone influenced by the ballad, have retained their place right up to the present day. His didactic religious poem Lyckens Hiul (The Wheel of Fortune) illustrates the view that took the place of the established mediaeval conviction: the world is now seen as a changeable and unpredictable place from which one has to flee to the security of the superior metaphysical world.

At the crossroads between Renaissance and baroque, Ditlev Ahlefeldt formulated this model of existence in exemplary fashion in the Foreword to his Memoires (c. 1680). Ahlefeldt was an opponent of absolutism. Christian IV's daughter, Leonora Christina, married to the traitor Corfitz Ulfeldt and imprisoned in the Blue Tower for 22 years, came into direct conflict with the new absolutist monarchy. Her Jammers Minde (Memory of Woe) (commenced 1673-1674) is an impressive human document from that time, and filled with keen observations of life. Here we find the undaunted sense of realism to which the philosophy of the age gave rise.

The Baroque [top]

The baroque (c. 1650-1720) was a period of growth in Danish literature. The new absolute monarchy wanted to produce a well-regulated society, and in parallel with this, literature embarked on producing rules for language and poetry. The 17th century produced a succession of grammars and prosodies and a few theories of poetry, of which the most important was Peder Syv's Nogle Betenkninger over det cimbriske Sprog (Some Thoughts on the Cimbrian Language) (1663). The baroque was the age when literature as an institution became aware of itself. Writers sought to compete with foreign languages in creating a literary language that was capable of achieving things. The language and forms of baroque literature are characterised by impressive rhetorical inventiveness and power, and they reveal an appetite for life that measures up to its stark celebration of the inconstancy of fortune and the certainty of death. There was both temporal and religious literature at that time. The printed temporal literature encompassed panegyric and funeral poems in the grand style (like those of Thomas Kingo), topographical poems and bucolic poems (like those of Anders Bording). Most of the temporal poetry of the day remained unpublished and was circulated in copies. The religious literature culminated in Thomas Kingo's Aandelige Siunge-Koor (Spiritual Song Choir) (1674 and 1681). Contemporary with Kingo were the great Norwegian hymn-writer Dorte Engelbretsdatter (Sjælens Sang-Offer - Song-Offering of the Soul, 1678) and her fellow-countryman Petter Dass. Grandiloquent high baroque is found in the work of Elias Naur, the author of hymns and the verse epic Golgatha paa Parnasso (Golgotha on Parnassus) (1689).

The Transition to the Enlightenment - Man at the Centre [top]

At the height of absolutism Ludvig Holberg gave temporal literature an international profile. Holberg brought home with him from his travels abroad the classicism that cultivated simple and pure form and the ideas of the Enlightenment, which put Man and human reason at the centre of things. As the author of legal, geographical and historical works, and works deriving from commonsense reasoning, Holberg sought to "examine accepted notions" and disseminate the light of reason. As the author of comedies for the first Danish theatre, the theatre in Lille Grønnegade in Copenhagen, he created between 1722 and 1728 the foundation for the Danish theatrical tradition. Both the mock-epic poem Peder Paars (1719-1720) and the comedies reveal that Holberg considered the scope of reason to be significantly more limited than did the subsequent Enlightenment proper. His fundamental view was still affected by the turbulent world picture of the Renaissance and the baroque, something which makes of his comedies exuberant and highly realistic pictures of life.

The pietist hymns of H.A. Brorson also put Man at the centre as a counter to the orthodoxy of the previous century. Brorson originated from the baroque and to a great extent shared its view of the turbulent world (as is seen from his poem The pitiful end of Lisbon, 1756). However, in continuation of German pietism he looked to the mystical experience as a countermeasure to the world's inconstancy. In his collection of hymns entitled Troens rare Klenodie (The Rare Jewel of Faith, 1739) he sometimes courted stylistic simplicity and intensity of feeling and sometimes complex symbolical pictures of the rebirth of the soul through the wounds of Christ. Amazingly elegant rococo sounds are the hallmark of the posthumously published Svanesang (Swansong, 1765), religious songs intended for private devotions.

The world as an (unreliable) voyage was also a prominent theme with Ambrosius Stub, from whose roving life as a poet there flowed rococo scenery, pietist hymns and drinking songs.

The Enlightenment [top]

Not until about 1750 did the Enlightenment establish itself as a broad movement in Danish literature, borne of a new affluent middle-class self-assurance and the progress of the new empirical sciences. Two institutions created the framework for the new literature: The Royal Theatre, which was founded in 1748 and became the central institution of manners and culture in Denmark right up to the second half of the 19th century, and the Society for the Furtherance of the Fine and Useful Sciences (founded 1759). Within the framework of these two the age developed its fundamentally new ideas on the well-ordered world, its conceptions of morals and gentle, humane Christianity, and not least its ideals of linguistic culture. With a foundation in the re-created Sorø Academy, to which Holberg had left his fortune, Jens Schelderup Sneedorff became the literary strategist of the Enlightenment and the champion of the new, French-inspired prose style. The wonderful economy of the well-ordered world were sung by the Norwegian Christian Braunmann Tullin, who emerged as the great celebrated poet of the twin kingdom in the 1760s. The age is moreover reflected by the hymn-writer Birgitte Boye, the author of plays and a collection of Moral Stories, Charlotte Dorothea Biehl, and the irrepressible humorist Johan Herman Wessel.

In the last decade of the century enlightenment was reinvigorated with a new sensitivity on the part of, among others, poets like Thomas Thaarup and Knud Lyne Rahbek. The Rahbek home in Copenhagen, Bakkehuset, with Kamma Rahbek as its intellectual focus, became a meeting place for people and literary ideas at the transitional time between Enlightenment, Romanticism and the incipient "Golden Age". Around 1800 the ideas of the Enlightenment and enthusiasm for the French Revolution led to the exile of authors such as Malthe Conrad Bruun and Peter Andreas Heiberg.

Pre-Romanticism [top]

Many currents came together in the work of Johannes Ewald, but first and foremost he proclaimed a new poetical self-assurance in which it was art that provided identity, whereas the private personality of the writer - as indeed happened with Ewald, as portrayed in his memoirs Levnet og Meeninger (Life and Opinions, c. 1774ff.) - must be lost as the fuel that is spent in the creation of art. As a poet he raised language to the level of the sublime. As a dramatist he touched on the conflict he knew from himself between feeling and the established order in the plays Adam og Eva (Adam and Eve, 1769) and Balders Død (The Death of Balder, 1773-1775). The greatest acclaim in his own day, however, he won with the celebratory national play Fiskerne (The Fishermen, 1779), which glorifies the moral strength of the people.

Jens Baggesen gave pre-Romanticism an international touch. On the basis of revolutionary moods of the heart and politics he wrote his brilliant travel account and confession Labyrinten (The Labyrinth, 1792-1793). About half of his work was written in German, including his European success Parthenaïs (1802/03), a hexameter idyll half way between the German writer of idylls, Voss, and the frenetical poetical enthusiasm of pre-Romanticism.

Romanticism and the Golden Age [top]

Romanticism made its appearance in Denmark soon after 1800 and received its particular resonance and form thanks to the national débâcle during the Napoleonic Wars. The ideas and subject range of German Romanticism were seized on with great alacrity by Danish writers. On the one hand the poet Schack Staffeldt brought inspiration home after spending several years in Germany in the 1790s, and on the other the scientist and philosopher Henrik Steffens came to Copenhagen in 1802 and spread the message in a series of lectures in Elers College and in discussions with Adam Oehlenschläger. As a result of these, Oehlenschläger experienced a poetical awakening and emerged as the central figure in early Danish Romanticism, followed by Nicolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig and Carsten Hauch, while Bernhard Severin Ingeman went his own way, closer to Staffeldt and the more radical German Romanticism. At different speeds they all moved in directions that led them away from the original visionary Romanticism and into work that was national, popular and historical in content, and often critical of contemporary manners.

In a way, Romanticism had a long-lasting influence on Denmark, in that its cult of poetry as a life force was mingled with a religious/Christian belief in eternity, providing the basic materials for a common poetical creed throughout the first half of the 19th century. In addition, it established a poetical language (partly influenced by that of the medieval ballad) that typified much Danish poetry until the end of the century. But in its purest form Romanticism as such was a short-lived intermezzo. The bourgeois culture from the late 18th century continued unabated and made its mark on the fundamental view of life, invigorated with ample influence from Goethe. Goethe's brand of humanism, Christianity, morals and watered-down Romanticism make up the principal elements of the period which in view of the unique richness of all the arts at this time has become known as the Golden Age.

Whereas Oehlenschläger was the foremost personality in Romanticism proper, the dramatist and critic Johan Ludvig Heiberg was the leading figure in the new direction which Romanticism took as it turned towards everyday life and subjects demanding a more richly facetted psychology ("the interesting"). The circle around Heiberg and his wife Johanne Luise Heiberg became a major cultural factor in the 1820s and 1830s. Another member of the circle was Heiberg's mother, Thomasine Gyllembourg, who with her poeticised and moderately religious/moral stories of everyday life achieved great popularity at the time and became the main representative of the spirit of the age known as Biedermeier.

A New Reality is Established [top]

In the 1820s and more especially in the 1830s, literature changed its general course under the influence of European fashions and encouraged by liberal economic and political thinking, all of which late absolutism was unable to suppress. Modernity was intoned in poetry by erotic poets such as Christian Winther and Emil Aarestrup, in the case of the latter also in his political poems.

That this was a transitional period, "the political period", was demonstrated even by Søren Kierkegaard. Among the principal figures were the outsiders Steen Steensen Blicher, N.F.S. Grundtvig (who, however, had a widespread following from the 1840s onwards), Hans Christian Andersen and Søren Kierkegaard. With them the boundaries of late absolutism were crossed, and styles, problems and views of the public proclaiming something new were adopted. Blicher's realistic, disillusioned stories (sometimes in dialect) from Jutland - a part of Denmark that had not hitherto appeared in literature - heralded the realism of a later age. Grundtvig, with a mixture of didactic zeal, unadorned Christianity and Romantic faith in the Spirit and the living word (of God), reformed Church and congregation through the revivalist movement he gave rise to. Thanks to the folk high school movement that emanated from him, he was a formative influence in establishing the Danes understanding of themselves and a Danish view of education and general culture. And throughout the rest of the century this movement became the basis upon which the rural population formed their sense of identity until they took political power in 1901 - and it continued to be felt well into the 20th century's social democratic culture. In his own career, Hans Christian Andersen broke through the barriers existing in the inflexible, bourgeois late absolutism of the time. In the fairy tale, which he transformed from the traditional popular fairy tale into a capricious, contemporary, realistic genre entirely of its own kind, he expressed the manifold and complex experiences which made him into a great psychologist, a man who was able to understand the interplay between people. At the same time he became an unorthodox religious spirit in a quest to which he never found a final answer. In many ways Andersen stood at the limit of his time, enthusiastic about the new technology in his confidence in progress and more humane conditions. Kierkegaard would have nothing to do with this "superficial nonsense", but likewise stood at the frontier of the period, intensifying the demand for truth in the individual's way of life. With a mixture of Christian idealism and psychological realism he pointed to reality as the place where the life of the individual must be measured.

About and immediately after the fall of absolutism in 1849, a new kind of society began to emerge. The age called for new initiatives, bringing into the foreground the debate on women's emancipation. With Mathilde Fibiger as a front figure a number of women authors entered the stage to take part in the literary discussion of the problem. Realists like Meïr Aron Goldschmidt and Hans Egede Schack captured the intellectual identity of the age, delving into its innermost recesses.

The Modern Breakthrough [top]

A new literature and a new ideological front, a cultural radicalism, broke through in the course of the 1870s to reach full flower in the 1880s. It was a common Scandinavian movement whose critical standard-bearers were Georg and Edvard Brandes. The Modern Breakthrough, as it came to be called by Georg Brandes (1883) was closely connected to industrialisation, the new sciences and the political conflicts surrounding the phasing out of the last remains of absolutist society. The process culminated in a landowners' dictatorship lasting until 1901 - the age of provisional laws which provided a spur for the work of Henrik Pontoppidan. As the decades up to the turn of the century were a period of dismantling and transformation, it was inevitable that the modern breakthrough in Denmark should largely take the form of a confrontation with the culture of the past. This confrontation came to occupy a greater space in literature than did the new developments taking place in society, industry and technology, to which writers in general closed their eyes.

This was the age of the decadent novel: Jens Peter Jacobsen's Niels Lyhne, Herman Bang's Haabløse Slægter (Generations without Hope) and others. The Church and Christianity and middle-class morality, especially sexual morality, were in the firing line, while Darwinism forced its way into the foreground as a view typical of the time. The modern breakthrough, naturalist in its early stages and realist subsequently, led to a new absorption in the life of the individual, partly inspired by the existential radical philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, whom Georg Brandes introduced in 1888.

With his translation of John Stuart Mills' On the Subjection of Women, Georg Brandes, appearing on a European, not merely a Danish or Scandinavian stage, started a debate on women's emancipation, but women authors of the day (Amalie Skram, Erna Juel-Hansen and others) established their own modern breakthrough.

In the country at large the ground was being prepared for the assumption of power by the farmers in 1901. This was the result of the folk high school movement's post-Romantic message to a social class in the process of establishing its own cultural self-awareness. Here the foundations were laid for the very extensive literature mirroring rural society that is so much a characteristic of Denmark from around 1900 until 1950.

Since the modern breakthrough, radicalism has remained a typical feature of Danish cultural and political life right up to the present day. At the same time the ideological polarisation led to a situation in which more than one kind of culture and literature existed side by side after the collapse of the unified culture of absolutism. That, too, is a characteristic still found today.

Symbolism and Fin-de-Siècle Literature [top]

Towards the turn of the century the intense preoccupation with natural phenomena which was part and parcel of naturalism and realism developed into a great wave of nature poetry, the greatest concentrated phenomenon of its kind in Denmark (Johannes Jørgensen, Viggo Stuckenberg, Sophus Claussen, Ludvig Holstein). Similarly it was a time when the focus on the individual that distinguished the crisis literature of naturalism and realism was further intensified into a subjective, emotive (often pessimistic) view of the surrounding world, linked to a new tendency to religion (Johannes Jørgensen, Helge Rode). As the editor of the periodical Taarnet (The Tower), Jørgensen introduced French symbolism, to which especially Sophus Claussen dedicated himself in his preoccupation with the compelling experiences of art.

Towards the turn of the century the novel of decadence took on a more desperate sense of doom (Johannes V. Jensen's Einar Elkær and Kongens Fald (The Fall of the King), Ernesto Dalgas' Lidelsens Vej (The Way of Suffering), Martin Andersen Nexø's Dryss (Waste)). Art nouveau that was characteristic of the architecture and applied arts of the day asserted itself especially in the prose works of Harald Kidde and Sophus Michaëlis, here as elsewhere with its roots in the prose of Jens Peter Jacobsen.

The Popular Breakthrough [top]

At the same time as the political system changed in 1901 there were new signals in painting (the Funen group of painters), music (Carl Nielsen) and literature. What became known as the popular breakthrough in literature - in reality the breakthrough for contemporary realism that was heralded in the 1870s and 1880s - covered a wide area socially and ideologically, but the main effort was literature about rural society.

Johannes V. Jensen became the great linguistic innovator of the period, the man who in general introduced a new kind of literature in the 20th century. Authors as different as Tom Kristensen and Martin A. Hansen as well as Klaus Rifbjerg have declared their indebtedness to this author who shared the ideology of the popular breakthrough but went much further in both subject matter and viewpoint. Martin Andersen Nexø was the first of the great proletarian writers.

Otherwise it was a feature of the period leading up to the First World War that alongside this popular breakthrough, works were still being written in continuation of the modern breakthrough, not least the new women's literature in which Agnes Henningsen scandalised her contemporaries by writing and living according to the more liberal norms of the day. Johannes V. Jensen's sister, Thit Jensen, the author of both historical and contemporary novels, stood as a leading figure in the debate around the role of women and sexuality.

The Inter-War Period [top]

The international isms, some of them deriving from the visual art of the day, made their mark on Danish literature starting at the time of the First World War. The first was expressionism, partly inspired by Johannes V. Jensen - found i.a. in the poetry and novels of Emil Bønnelycke and Tom Kristensen. It was followed by a scattering of surrealism (from Jens August Schade via Bodil Bech and Tove Meyer and on to Gustaf Munch-Petersen). Although these isms were the precursors of the later modernism, they were nevertheless only marginal phenomena in the literature of the day, the main characteristic of which was a miscellaneous flow of broadly descriptive realism: from the bourgeois, naturalistic Jacob Paludan through sociological and social critical literature (collective novels, novels about the class struggle and broad, socially based novels of personal development) to the new, Freud-inspired psychological work of authors such as Hans Christian Branner.

Particularly the 1930s were characterised by a division between a cultural-radical, at times socialist tendency and an otherwise quite inhomogeneous group of authors who continued writing in well-proven modes with a broad (conservative) public appeal. Among the cultural radicals the outstanding figure was the architect, designer of lamps and furniture, review writer and cultural polemicist Poul Henningsen (PH). On the conservative front it was especially the pastor and dramatist Kaj Munk who attracted attention. Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen), whose books from the middle of the 1930s started to appear first in the USA and then in Denmark, occupied a position of her own. A declared aristocratic conservatism was accompanied by a rebellious femininity in her stories and was in fact the expression of a Nietzsche-inspired criticism of culture that dated back to the 1890s and articulated itself in the cult of the wisdom contained in myth.

The Heretica Period [top]

By the end of the 1930s, Paul la Cour was already taking steps to resurrect symbolism, arguing for it in a manifesto entitled Fragmenter af en Dagbog (Fragments of a Diary). A group of authors formed itself around the periodical Heretica, led by Martin A. Hansen, Ole Wivel and Thorkild Bjørnvig and marking a break with naturalism and realism and its view of mankind. Instead they took religion, ethics, art, form or universal nature as their basis. Common to many authors and writers at the time during and immediately after the German Occupation was the experience of a profound cultural crisis which on the basis of sympathy with modernist pictorial art was given a visionary expression with religious overtones in the poetry of Ole Sarvig, and, in a more optimistic light, that of the young Frank Jæger.

Post-War Modernism and Traditionalism [top]

International modernism found its Danish expression in the circle around Heretica: Martin A. Hansen's experimental short stories, Branner's experiments with stream of consciousness in short stories, drama and novels, Sarvig's poetry. But it was an ethically concerned modernism. In the 1950s a modernism made its breakthrough that to a far greater extent took modernity for granted and found adequate expression for it. Villy Sørensen founded a new, freely imaginative and apparently "absurd" narrative style. Both his philosophy and his creative writing started from a sharpened linguistic awareness that was able to portray loss of identity and alienation. For Klaus Rifbjerg the path led him away from the stance of an angry young man in an increasingly experimental direction, culminating in the volume of poems entitled Konfrontation and the suite of poems called Camouflage. After the 1970s his substantial production moved in other directions more responsive to public taste, but in his poetry his pioneering qualities and his spirited realism coalesced with a linguistic energy which has made of him an innovator on a level with Johannes V. Jensen and Adam Oehlenschläger.

The greatest public impact was seen in Leif Panduro's television drama revealing the fundamental absurdity of the middle classes. Throughout the 1960s and in the beginning of the 1970s there was a movement away from a preoccupation with "the absurd" (the young Benny Andersen's poetry and short stories, Peter Seeberg's then widely discussed prose, Ivan Malinowski's poetry, etc.) towards a constructivist or formalist modernism with Hans-Jørgen Nielsen as one of its spokesmen and culminating in Inger Christensen's linguistic creation, Det (It), Sven Åge Madsen's novels (including Sæt verden er til - Suppose the World Exists) and Per Højholt's mischievous textual sequences. Henrik Nordbrandt occupies a special position with his melancholy, musical poetry.

Alongside modernism there were also other currents: an existential-historical documentarism in the work of Thorkild Hansen; in the case of Tage Skou-Hansen and Erik Aalbæk Jensen a broad critical and existential realism in the tradition of Henrik Pontoppidan; autobiographically-tinged work with social, psychological perspectives and depictions of women's lives from Tove Ditlevsen; Anders Bodelsen's, Christian Kampmann's and Henrik Stangerup's contemporary realism.

The Public and Privatisation [top]

The student revolution of 1968 led to a vigorous renewal of the ideological debate and a consequent loss of interest in the exclusive literary experiments. During the 1970s a new proletarian literature emerged, and more particularly a new wave of women's writing, including the work of Jette Drewsen, Vita Andersen and Dea Trier Mørch, who stood at the centre of a protracted public debate. The severe ideological criticism of the function and forms of literature, which thrived in the university environment, helped to force authors' interests towards an everyday life free from ideologies, private thoughts, confessions and intimate revelations. The everyday quality of so-called chopped-up prose, poetry texts close to ordinary speech, became a popular and much read poetical form at the same time as the lyrical avant-garde rather more quietly developed in for instance the computer-science-oriented texts of Klaus Høeck.

Mythologies, Post-Modernism and New Inventive Writing [top]

In the 1980s and 1990s readers had become satiated with confessions concerning intimate everyday life and with form without form. At the same time as student marxism was declining under the rise of non-socialist politics, literature turned back to its own roots as literature. The modernism of a new generation with Michael Strunge, Bo Green Jensen, Pia Tafdrup and Søren Ulrik Thomsen is not only inspired by rock music and a modern body consciousness, but has also freely been able to look back to romantic and symbolist forms. The last two names in the above list have formulated their ideas in theories of poetry. A practised realist like Henrik Stangerup moved via ideological and personal confrontations into the realm of cultural history and mythology. A number of lyric poets, inspired by older modernists like Ole Sarvig and Jørgen Gustava Brandt, turned again to the hymn, which has been one of the cornerstones of Danish literature, but which had generally speaking lain untouched since Grundtvig. A new religiosity together with the contemporary preoccupation with the Universe and Nature formed the background of the renewed interest in the hymn. A critical environmental consciousness was given universal and mythological dimensions in the nature motifs of Thorkild Bjørnvig and Vagn Lundbye.

These decades saw the emergence of a lively narrative art. Kirsten Thorup wrote about women's experiences in prose that balances between a socially-tinged, far-reaching realism and a psychological interior world. To a great extent, prose writers have worked with hybrid forms, somewhere between novel and memoir in for instance in the case of Suzanne Brøgger, and between realism and highly conscious style in Peter Seeberg and Jens Smærup Sørensen. Dorrit Willumsen has in a series of frightening portrayals depicted modern people as mechanical models and victims of a distorted social order. Life as an anthology of human fates in common isolation is found in Peer Hultberg's analytical prose. The internationally widespread hybrid form of realism and fantastic narration, magic realism, has also made its special mark in Danish literature in various ways, but with wide international appeal in the work of Ib Michael and Peter Høeg. The fact that Karen Blixen has been one of the most read and discussed of the older generation during this time has also had its effect. However, despite the affinities in the imaginative writing, there is a considerable gap between the divine staging of the world in Karen Blixen's stories and diffuse postmodernism and the pioneering body consciousness that, with varying intensity, asserted itself in Danish literature in the latter half of the 1980s and into the 1990s.

Johan de Mylius

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