Tore Rem

Nationalism or Internationalism? The Early Irish Reception of Ibsen

In his Autobiography William Butler Yeats describes his experience after watching the first British performance of A Doll’s House in London in 1889. Yeats was on the whole dismissive of Ibsen’s work, criticizing it because art, as he put it, was not the same as nature, and because Ibsen’s plays, in Yeats’s opinion, left little room for poetry and music. In a famous formulation he spoke of the ‘stale odour of spilt poetry’ in Rosmersholm. As to A Doll’s House, Yeats confessed that he ‘hated the play’, but he felt forced to admit that he and his generation could not escape Ibsen, ‘because, though we and he had not the same friends, we had the same enemies’. This article on Ibsen and Ireland will focus not on Ibsen’s enemies, but on some of his more or less enthusiastic Irish friends, writers and literary middlemen, who at one stage found him attractive or useful, who sought out a literary model in what the great Norwegian playwright was seen to represent, sometimes in spite of the fact that they objected to central aspects of his work. My main claim is that there is a striking tension within the early Irish reception of Ibsen, a tension which in significant ways differs from Ibsen’s Norwegian or Dano-Norwegian reception. In Ireland Ibsen was appropriated for what seem like two diametrically opposed purposes. Firstly, in the service of the nation, and, secondly, as an example of someone free of national pressures, a writer who had managed to escape the category of the national in order to pursue his own explorations within the category of the literary. Yeats’s statement is at best a lukewarm tribute, and it may serve as a reminder of the fierce cultural battles which were being fought over Ibsen in what was then the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. These battles were at their most intense from the mid1880s and for the next ten to fifteen years. Yeats’s guarded support for Ibsen may also, and perhaps most importantly in this context,

The Penguinisation of Ibsen

This article investigates the current generation of Penguin Ibsen editions, translated by Una Ellis-Fermor and Peter Watts and dating back to the 1950s and ‘60s. It sketches the development of Penguin’s publishing profile, and goes on to consider the role played by Penguin Classics in maintaining Ibsen as a central writer in the Western canon, and, with time, in world literature. By examining paratexts, materiality and translation strategies, the main part of the article considers how these editions construct their particular Ibsens. It looks, among other things, at the organisational principles and the scholarly apparatus. The article concludes by briefly noting some possible ambitions for, as well as challenges facing, a new generation of Penguin Ibsen editions.

Ibsen, Scandinavia and the Making of a World Drama

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 , the nation’s literary presence was negligible, yet by  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 Fulsås 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. Ibsen, Scandinavia and the Making of a World Drama 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.

How Was Ibsen’s Modern Drama Possible?

One of the major renewals in the history of drama is Henrik Ibsen’s “modern tragedy” of the 1880s and 1890s. Since Ibsen’s own time, this renewal has been seen as an achievement accomplished in spite, rather than because, of Ibsen’s Norwegian and Scandinavian contexts of origin. His origins have consistently been associated with provinciality, backwardness and restrictions to be overcome, and his European “exile” has been seen as the great liberating turning point of his career. We will, on the contrary, argue that throughout his career Ibsen belonged to Scandinavian literature and that his trajectory was fundamentally conditioned and shaped by what happened in the intersection between literature, culture and politics in Scandinavia. In particular, we highlight the continued association and closeness between literature and theatre, the contested language issue in Norway, the superimposition of literary and political cleavages and dynamics as well as the transitory stage of copyright.