KNUT HAMSUN, A POPULAR PROGRESSIVE REACTIONARY
KNUT HAMSUN, A POPULAR PROGRESSIVE REACTIONARY

Summary/Abstract: Starting with Knut Hamsun’s first novel, Hunger (1890) this paper tries to explore the reasons why Hamsun even today, 150 years after he was born, has such strong impact on his readers. A number of reasons for his popularity is mentioned - e.g. his unique and poetic style of writing, his humour, his intense and tragic love stories, his renewal of European poetry of nature. Special emphasis is put on his complex and modern and independent female characters, for instance Edvarda Mack in the novel Pan (1894).In several ways the young and left-wing radical Knut Hamsun developed into a more conservative, some would say reactionary, author. But even in his more conservative novels there are many progressive tendencies to be found. In spite of his sympathy for Germany during World War II, Knut Hamsun is today one of the most widely read authors in Norway, and some of the reasons for this seem to be his youthful and modern mixture of humour and desperation, of pain and happiness.

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