Northern Arts is a magnificent and provocative exploration of Scandinavian literature and art. With intellectual power and deep emotional insights, writer and critic Arnold Weinstein guides us through the most startling works created by the writers and artists of Scandinavia over the past two centuries.
Here readers will gain new perspectives on canonical giants such as Søren Kierkegaard, Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Edvard Munch, Knut Hamsun, and Ingmar Bergman. Readers will also encounter popular favorites like children’s writer Astrid Lindgren, and come to know the work of lesser-known masters such as the novelist Tarjei Vesaas and the painters Ernst Josephson and Lena Cronqvist. Weinstein uses the concept of “breakthrough”—boundary smashing, restlessness, and the exploding of traditional forms and values—as a thematic lens through which to expose the roiling energies and violence that course through Scandinavian literature and art. Defying preconceptions of Scandinavian culture as depressive or brooding, Weinstein invites us to imagine anew this transformative and innovative tradition of art that continually challenges ideas about the sacred and the profane, family and marriage, children, patriarchy, and personal identity. Through these works he brings us face-to-face with our most hidden selves and urges, enriching our understanding of the emotions and forces that govern our lives.
Northern Arts is the essential introduction to Scandinavian literature and art, one that illuminates the fierce beauty and breathtaking reach of these incomparable works.
Awards and Recognition
- Runner-Up for the 2009 Atlantic's Best Book of the Year
- One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2009
Arnold Weinstein is the Edna and Richard Salomon Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University. His books include Recovering Your Story: Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, Morrison and A Scream Goes Through the House: What Literature Teaches Us About Life (both Random House).
"To take issue with Ibsen's creations . . . is of course to pay tribute to their vitality, their instructive meaningfulness. The allusion here, provides a perfect example of that remarkable kinship, that constant intellectual exchange, between Scandinavian artists in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth, between those creative spirits of whom later writers and painters from the same provenance felt themselves the heirs. This interconnectedness is integral to Weinstein's ambitious new account of 'the breakthrough of Scandinavian literature and art, from Ibsen to Bergman', though his concern is principally with the congruity of his subjects' preoccupations and artistic choices. . . . [Weinstein's] style can rise to impressive levels of eloquence, and never more so than when he is writing of painting."—Paul Binding, Times Literary Supplement
"The most ambitious American effort in memory to view Scandinavian culture whole. It unfolds as if the head of our National Book Awards had denounced Scandinavian culture as too hermetic to merit attention in the United States. Almost in reply to such an imagined slight, Weinstein celebrates his subject for projecting a globally influential ethos that transcends any role as merely an occasional producer of world-class artists."—Carlin Romano, Chronicle of Higher Education
"This weighty, detailed, and authoritative but lively tome elucidates the revolution Scandinavia wrought in the world of arts and letters beginning in the 19th century. . . . Weinstein's is a brilliantly told story of how an underpopulated region developed from repressive backwater to cutting-edge artistic fulcrum."—Atlantic
"This is comparative scholarship at its best."—Choice
"Weinstein casts shimmering northern lights and reads deeply by them into the works of many Scandinavian godlike figures. Even better, he reveals to a wider world audience the startling, sometimes visionary, paintings of August Strindberg, Ernst Josephson, and Lena Cronqvist."—Rika Lesser, author of Questions of Love: New and Selected Poems
"Well-written and informative. Weinstein is a brilliant and sensitive reader of texts and an imaginative reader of paintings. There is not a chapter in this volume that I did not learn something from. Northern Arts was a pleasure to read. I know of nothing quite like this book."—Susan C. Brantly, author of Understanding Isak Dinesen
"Throughout his separate studies, Weinstein offers illuminating insights. I have benefited significantly from reading Northern Arts, gaining new perspective on specific works, authors, and artists I thought I already knew."—Reinhold Heller, author of Confronting Identities in German Art
"Northern Arts is a highly original and extremely engaging examination of masterpieces of Scandinavian literature and art that have not commanded the international attention they deserve. The book is full of original insights and critical perceptions. It represents a very valuable and rich contribution to our understanding of a wide range of literary and cultural phenomena."—Steven P. Sondrup, Brigham Young University
