Abstract
In sociology, modernisation is often identified with secularisation. How can secularisation in the texts of modernism around 1900 be analysed? Literary history books tell us that the modernist authors were lucid analysts of their time who portrayed the process of secularisation going on around them in their dramas, novels or short stories. The article tries out a different approach: By conceptualizing secularisation as a cultural narrative, the perspective on the literary material changes fundamentally. The modernist authors were involved in shaping the idea of secularisation in the first place, in propagating it and in working on its implementation. They did not react to the process of secularisation with their texts. Instead, they were involved in the creation and shaping of the interpretative category ‘secularisation’. The article exemplifies this change in approach using a pivotal text of Nordic literary modernism, Ibsen’s Rosmersholm.
Highlights
In sociology, modernisation is often identified with secularisation
One of the generally accepted notions of the Scandinavian classification of period is that modernity was introduced to Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish literature when Georg Brandes gave his first lecture in his series on 19th century European literature at the University of Copenhagen in 1871: Brandes propagated a decidedly modern literature which drew its modernity from responding to the pushes for modernisation that fundamentally changed European societies in the second half of the 19th century; he registered how industrialisation and modern monetary economics were putting mental frameworks in motion, how social boundaries were opening up, how women were breaking out of traditional roles, how Christianity was losing its status
My main hypothesis is that the mentioned authors were not lucid analysts of their time who portrayed the process of secularisation going on around them in their dramas, novels, or short stories; instead, they invested their own texts in the debate about how the relationship between religion and modernity should be thought of in the first place
Summary
One of the generally accepted notions of the Scandinavian classification of period is that modernity was introduced to Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish literature when Georg Brandes gave his first lecture in his series on 19th century European literature at the University of Copenhagen in 1871: Brandes propagated a decidedly modern literature which drew its modernity from responding to the pushes for modernisation that fundamentally changed European societies in the second half of the 19th century; he registered how industrialisation and modern monetary economics were putting mental frameworks in motion, how social boundaries were opening up, how women were breaking out of traditional roles, how Christianity was losing its status He called for a literary awareness that covers these four important issues: the unjust distribution of property, the social stratification, the relationship between the sexes, and the social role of religion. My analysis has a purely illustrative character and focuses exclusively on the way secularisation is narrated in the drama
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