Conceptualizing Danish Literary Romanticism

Om dansk litterær romantik

Abstract

There has emerged a tradition in Danish literary history dealing with the first wave of romanticism in terms of “universal romanticism,” or more specifically as being directly inspired by “the German universal romanticism”.

As a follow-up to the postscript in my textcritical edition 2019 (published by The Danish Society for Language and Literature and Gyldendal Publishers) of Adam Oehlenschläger’s debut Digte (1802/1803), this paper claims that the concept of a “German universal romanticism” is not a German, but a Danish invention, presented by Vilhelm Andersen in his thesis Guldhornene [the golden horns] 1896 (dealing with Oehlenschläger’s now canonic poem from Digte). The point being that it was Vilhelm Andersen’s intention to establish a weighty breakthrough opposite to the 1870 modern breakthrough of cultural radicalism by Georg Brandes.

The critical spotlight of this paper is not limited to Vilhelm Andersen’s concept of period, but deals as well with F.J. Billeskov Jansen’s elaboration on Vilhelm Andersen in vol. 3 (1958) of his Danmarks Digtekunst and not least with the replacement of “universal romanticism” with the Rudolf Steiner-inspired term of “organicism” by Aage Henriksen and his “school” of followers in and after their 4-volume literary history titled Ideologihistorie [history of ideology] 1975/76.