Bjørnstjerne Martinus Bjørnson, Synnøve Solbakken

Kathy Rees (Independent Scholar - Europe)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.3.5: Norwegian Writing and Culture.
Vol. editors: Sven Hakon Rossel (Universitat Wien), Herbert Rowland (Purdue University), Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen (University College London), Anja Tröger (University of Edinburgh)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1857

Places

Norway (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novella

Resources

This is the first of Bjørnson’s many “bonde-novellen”, a coming-of-age story set within a peasant culture. The peasant tales of Steen Blicher (Danish), Berthold Auerbach (German), and Jeremias Gotthelf (Swiss) were already very popular, but Bjørnson’s work marked a radical break with traditional forms by his infusion of the saga spirit. Theodore Jorgenson described it as “an epoch-making work in Norwegian literature . . . prophetic of the rise of the novel” (278). Since boyhood, Bjørnson had believed that the characters of the sagas lived again among the bonde, and he sought “to elevate our history through its greatest and most characteristically Norwegian men, and t…

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1228 words

Citation: Rees, Kathy. "Synnøve Solbakken". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 24 August 2017 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=38780, accessed 25 November 2024.]

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