Tracing Transatlantic Circles: Manufacturing Cosmopolitanism in Music and Literature during the Late Nineteenth Century

Abstract

ABSTRACTContemporaries Edvard Grieg (1843–1907) and Edward MacDowell (1860–1908) shared a similar goal of dismantling the label of “national artist” in favor of constructing a broader cosmopolitan identity. Although they never met, their mutual appreciation was symptomatic of a deeper affinity: an aesthetic style marked by ambivalence and detachment rather than national pandering. This struggle did not occur in isolation, as their correspondence candidly acknowledges. Each composer fostered a multi-layered worldview based upon the values concurrently advanced by their literary colleagues, including Hamlin Garland (1860–1940), Arne Garborg (1851–1924), and Knut Hamsun (1859–1952). An intertextual analysis of the cosmopolitan conditions that simultaneously emerged across disciplinary boundaries offers an examination of the role played by the composers’ cosmopolitan imagination in manufacturing new modes of heterogeneity amidst the dynamic interaction of cultural borders.