literary context

Question 1

Role of prose and verse

Answer 1

-most serious plays preformed in verse from dramas to comedies to Shakespeare
-typically only comedic moments or less intelligible lines were spoken in prose due to every day dialogue was seen as lesser

Question 1

Ibsons use of prose

Answer 1

-was determined that realistic characters needed realistic dialogue
-with this rise in a new style of play came a new style of interest in ‘thinking plays’- these challenged traditional morality and conventional aspersions
-prose allowed the audience to see themselves more easily in the characters and in turn made the moral dilemmas all the more shocking

Question 2

what is realism

Answer 2

• realism represents reality by portraying everyday life without melodrama
• primarily focusses on the middle and working classes
  -realism attemptes to tell a story TRUTHFULLY WITHOUT ROMANTICISING IT
  -realisim originated in france particularly with Balzac who wr

Question 3

origins of realism

Answer 3

-realism originated in france particularly with BALZAC who wore off complex characters who escape moral absolutism focussed on observations about society and mundanity

Question 4

ibson and realism

Answer 4

-ibson essentially invented and introduced Norway to realism
-prior to ibson most plays and works of literature were fantastical with fairy tales and supernatural themes , in other words, bourgeois romanticism

Question 5

Naturalism

Answer 5

-ibson is often identified as a naturalist
-defintion: naturalism often focused on determinism, or the inability of human beings to resist the biological, social, and economic forces that dictated their behavior and their fate.
-ibson was intersted in interiority of characters shown though what he called ‘seemingly easy but concealing conversations

Question 6

Norwegian litrature (history and timeline)

Answer 6

-When Norway broke from Denmark in 1814 Henrik Wergeland pushed for a break from Danish culture and attempted to drive the movement of ‘national romanticism’
- By 1855 there was a reaction to this from Wegelands sister who published ‘the district governors daughter’ which considered the place of women in society and the beginning of what Ibson would come to represent of ‘PROBLEM LITERATURE ‘

Question 7

Norwegian literature (ibsons contempories)

Answer 7

• writing as Ibsons contemporaries were Kielland ad Bjørnson
  Kielland: elegant witty novelist, focus on social issues and societies and moral hypocrisy. He has zeal for reform and admired J.S Mills radical theories on liberalism and social morality
  Bijørnson: polemicist by nature and involved keen in politics and as radical agitator

Question 8

what is national romanticism

Answer 8

• genrally comprised of Norwegian writers exhuming folk tales and rewriting or codifying these into distinct national mythos