The Resistance to Modernism in Karl Gjellerup’s Germanernes Lærling (1882)

Abstract

The modern breakthrough in Nordic literature was ushered in by the Danish critic Georg Brandes (1842–1927), who began delivering his landmark lectures on the main currents in European literature in 1871. For all its complexity his movement came to be associated—polemically or programmatically—with simplistic catchword versions of naturalism and positivism; and thanks to its affront to the Danish national liberals and their cultural and clerical establishment, the breakthrough’s ideological tenor was generally seen as a soulless materialistic rationalism: “If you insist on talking about a naturalistic form of religion, it must be an optimistic faith in progress, by which perfection will once be arrived at” (Andersen 19).¹