Henrik Ibsen's drama is the most prominent and lasting contribution of the cultural surge seen in Scandinavian literature in the later nineteenth century. When he made his debut in Norway in 1850, the nation's literary presence was negligible, yet by 1890 Ibsen had become one of Europe's most famous authors. Contrary to the standard narrative of his move from restrictive provincial origins to liberating European exile, Narve Fulsas and Tore Rem show how Ibsen's trajectory was preconditioned on his continued embeddedness in Scandinavian society and culture, and that he experienced great success in his home markets. This volume traces how Ibsen's works first travelled outside Scandinavia and studies the mechanisms of his appropriation in Germany, Britain and France. Engaging with theories of book dissemination and world literature, and re-assessing the emergence of 'peripheral' literary nations, this book provides new perspectives on the work of this major figure of European literature and theatre.

'When the snow water had broken crevices open in the mountain a shot or even just a sharp cry was enough to tear loose a huge slab and send it toppling.' Lieutenant Thomas Glahn spends a summer in northern Norway, where the midnight sun triggers a short but intense release of energies. Living out of a rudimentary hut on the edge of the forest, he pursues a solitary existence, hunting, fishing, and engaging intermittently with the inhabitants of the nearby coastal village. Among these is Edvarda, daughter of the wealthy local trader Herr Mack. Their mutual attraction rapidly develops into an erotic fascination shot through with suspicions and jealousies; a series of fraught encounters culminates in violent actions with unforeseen consequences. First published in 1894, Pan was an immediate success and remains a classic of Norwegian literature. It embodies many of the distinctive features of Hamsun's early works, in particular a rejection of psychological stereotypes and a style infused by what Hamsun called a 'poetry of the nerves'. Terence Cave's new translation restores the power and virtuosity of Hamsun's original and includes an illuminating introduction and explanatory notes. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Henrik Ibsen, the 'Father of Modern Drama', came from a seemingly inauspicious background. What are the key contexts for understanding his appearance on the world stage? This collection provides thirty contributions from leading scholars in theatre studies, literary studies, book history, philosophy, music, and history, offering a rich interdisciplinary understanding of Ibsen's work, with chapters ranging across cultural and aesthetic contexts including feminism, scientific discovery, genre, publishing, music, and the visual arts. The book ends by charting Ibsen's ongoing globalization and gives valuable overviews of major trends within Ibsen studies. Accessibly written, while drawing on the most recent scholarship, Ibsen in Context provides unique access to Ibsen the man, his works, and their afterlives across the world.

Henrik Ibsen's drama is the most prominent and lasting contribution of the cultural surge seen in Scandinavian literature in the later nineteenth century. When he made his debut in Norway in 1850, the nation's literary presence was negligible, yet by 1890 Ibsen had become one of Europe's most famous authors. Contrary to the standard narrative of his move from restrictive provincial origins to liberating European exile, Narve Fulsas and Tore Rem show how Ibsen's trajectory was preconditioned on his continued embeddedness in Scandinavian society and culture, and that he experienced great success in his home markets. This volume traces how Ibsen's works first travelled outside Scandinavia and studies the mechanisms of his appropriation in Germany, Britain and France. Engaging with theories of book dissemination and world literature, and re-assessing the emergence of 'peripheral' literary nations, this book provides new perspectives on the work of this major figure of European literature and theatre.

'It was at the time when I was wandering around hungry in Kristiania, that strange city no one leaves before it has set its mark on them...' Hunger is the first-person story of a young man desperately trying to establish himself in the city as a writer, living in shabby lodgings where he can seldom afford to pay the rent, eating almost nothing, and engaging spasmodically and manically with landladies, eccentric elderly men, policemen, shopkeepers, pawnbrokers, and others on the way. He wanders around the streets, sits on benches trying to write, spends a night locked in a pitch-dark police cell, thinks, slides into remarkably inventive reveries, speculates on his mental health, his ethical comportment, his relation to the divinity, the topics he might write about. The traces of a consistent narrative logic are uncertain and blurred; the voice of the narrator keeps shifting between pragmatic appraisal of his situation, wild fantasies, manic outbursts, anger, and despair. This is a story that lies on the threshold of modernism, anticipating many of the dislocations that narrative will be subject to in the decades to come. This new translation seeks to restore the startling freshness and epidermal unease of Hamsun's breakthrough story of 1890. It remains faithful to the style and voice of the text, the shifts of tense, the indirect free style, and the constant changes of register as the inner monologue moves between poetic sensitivity, wild fantasies, manic outbursts, and hyperbolic emotion. Tore Rem's introduction provides an updated and fresh account of the genesis of Hunger, its book history and its reception. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Four of Ibsen’s most important plays in superb modern translation: A Doll's House, Ghosts, Pillars of the Community, An Enemy of the People.

With her assertion that she is “first and foremost a human being,” rather than a wife, mother or fragile doll, Nora Helmer sent shockwaves throughout Europe when she appeared in Henrik Ibsen’s greatest and most famous play, A Doll’s House. Ibsen’s follow-up, Ghosts, was no less radical, with its unrelenting investigation into religious hypocrisy, family secrets, and sexual double-dealing. These two masterpieces are accompanied here by The Pillars of Society and An Enemy of the People, both exploring the tensions and dark compromises at the heart of society.

Ibsen's greatest late plays in superb modern translations, part of the new Penguin Ibsen series. This volume includes The Master Builder, Little Eyolf, John Gabriel Borkman and When We Dead Awaken - Ibsen's last four plays, written in his old age in Oslo. In The Master Builder, a married, middle-aged architect becomes bewitched by a strange young woman who claims to have known him for years. A sudden death in Little Eyolf is the catalyst that drives a couple into a greater understanding of themselves. In John Gabriel Borkman, a banker recently released from prison must choose between his wife and her sister, while a sculptor on holiday is reunited with the woman who inspired his greatest art in When We Dead Awaken. The new Penguin series of Ibsen's major plays offer the best available editions in English, under the general editorship of Tore Rem. All the plays have been freshly translated by leading translators and are based on the definitive Norwegian edition of Ibsen's works. This volume includes an introduction by Toril Moi on the themes of death and human limitation in the plays, and additional editorial apparatus by Tore Rem. Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) is often called 'the Father of Modern Drama'. Born in the small Norwegian town of Skien, he left Norway in 1864 for a twenty-one-year long voluntary exile in Italy and Germany. After successes with the verse dramas Brand and Peer Gynt, he turned to prose, writing his great twelve-play cycle of society dramas between 1877 and 1899. This included The Pillars of Society, A Doll's House, Ghosts, An Enemy of the People, The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm, The Lady from the Sea, Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder, Little Eyolf, John Gabriel Borkman, and, finally, When We Dead Awaken. Ibsen returned to Norway in 1891 and died there at the age of seventy-eight. Barbara J. Haveland and Anne-Marie Stanton-Ife are both freelance literary translators. Toril Moi is Professor of English, Theater Studies and Philosophy at Duke University. Her books include Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism (2006). Tore Rem is Professor of British literature at the University of Oslo and author of Henry Gibson/Henrik Ibsen (2006).