Publisher's Synopsis
Roger Shattuck, in THE BANQUET YEARS, dates 1885 to the beginning of WWI as "the lively childhood of our era." Charles Peguy, in 1913, contends "The world has changed less since Jesus Christ, than it has in the last thirty years." G.M. Trevelyan notes "Unlike dates, Periods are not facts. They are retrospective conceptions that we form about past events, useful to focus discussions." In 1890, in Oslo, Norway, the most important text of Modernism was published: Knut Hamsun's HUNGER. From 1892 to 1899 Henrik Ibsen published his last quartet of prose plays transmuting drama from social realism to symbolic, expressionist, modern art and in his last play, WHEN WE DEAD AWAKEN, 1899, gave birth to the Theatre of the Absurd. In the 1890's Edvard Munch - in a vision of loneliness, despair, fear, anxiety, and anger, painted with colorful passionate expression - introduced Expressionism to art. The self-portraiture, the style of all three, employed the tools that critically underpinned James Joyce's texts and which have become inherent to modernism: "subjectiveness, fragmentariness, use of flashbacks, lyricism." Artists and writers who stand outside France and England, with few exceptions (i.e. Joyce: Ireland), have not been given credit, and thereby have not gained the stature they deserve. That is until the last four decades when a movement to explode the canon has increasingly gained momentum. The increasing number of works published on Ibsen, Hamsun, and Munch, in the last forty years, especially the scholarly works of the 1980's, exemplify the trend. No artist, neglected or not, deserves more attention and inclusion into the inner circle of the most prominent and influential artists than these three. The works of Ibsen, Hamsun, and Munch (and eventually Joyce), like fault lines that irrevocably alter the earth, transformed literature and art so they would never be the same.
