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Romantic Drama and Staging Romanticism in Scandinavia

The Caspar David Friedrich exhibition in the Hamburger Kunsthalle in the autumn of 1974 made many Scandinavian scholars look upon Romanticism in a new way. Romanticism as such had already been thoroughly discussed, but the most important early-nineteenthcentury authors and artists were considered sentimental and conservative, if not reactionary. Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp had made Constable and Runge seem old fashioned and T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound made Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley seem superficial and inexact. In Scandinavia, the Modern Breakthrough with authors such as Georg Brandes, Henrik Ibsen, and August Strindberg made poets like Adam Oehlenschläger in Denmark and P. D. A. Atterbom in Sweden very remote—curiosities to be bracketed in the steady development of modern rational aesthetics from the Enlightenment to the present day. In the course of a few years, these established “truths” were overturned. In the 1970s, there was a revival of interest in Walter Benjamin, which resulted in an eminent scholarly edition of his writings. His The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism, published already in 1919, made early German Romanticism, the Frühromantik, appear in a strikingly modern way by emphasizing the philosophical aspects of Romanticism. The fascinating interpretations by German literary scholars such as Ernst Behler, Manfred Frank, Jochen Hörisch, and Friedrich A. Kittler threw a new theoretical light on Romantic prose and poetry. The discussion between established and new Romantic scholars can be studied in the anthology Die Aktualität der Frühromantik, edited by Behler and Hörisch in 1987. In the American context, a rethinking of the English Romantic canon was initiated by Harold Bloom in his essays from 1970, Romanticism and Consciousness. A few years later, Paul de Man’s milestone The Rhetoric of Romanticism was published (1984) which, together with other books by authors like J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey H. Hartman, and Harold Bloom resulted in a proliferation of theoretically advanced studies of Romantic textuality throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Cynthia Chase edited a selection of these in a collection of essays under the title Romanticism (1993). In Scandinavia, one special question became urgent. If international authors like the brothers Schlegel, Novalis, Hoffmann, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley can be looked upon in a new light, one so different from the conventional, what about our own Romantic authors? In order to investigate this question, seminars were held. In Sweden, projects were planned in the early 1980s—a special issue of the journal Kris (no. 23/24) published the results in 1982. In Denmark, a research network, Literary Criticism and the Study of Romanticism, subsidized by the Danish Research Council, was formed in 1994, and afterwards followed up by the founding of the Danish Association for the Study of Romanticism in 1997. Now, several decades later, we have many eminent examples of scholarly works on the topic in Scandinavia. The works of our Romantic authors are currently being reinterpreted in a dialogue with recent issues in literary criticism and from a wide range of theoretical perspectives, from encompassing linguistic-rhetorical readings to contextualizing discussions with an accent on Cultural theory and issues on such topics as identity, nationality, and gender. In our present Nordic Association for Romantic Studies, a successor to the