25 - Georg Brandes (1842–1927)

Summary

A native of Denmark, Georg Brandes was the most prominent and controversial critic of Danish literature and culture during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His introduction of Friedrich Nietzsche to Scandinavian culture, with reverberations in Germany, is but one example of his critical range. Brandes was an outspoken champion of women's rights, yet his treatment of particular women writers has been fiercely contested, especially by younger feminist critics and scholars. Brandes habitually showed little respect for conventional cultural and critical sensibilities. The Romantic in Brandes defined his relation to Roman and Greek Antiquity. He rejected the Romans as unpoetic and elevated the Greeks, whom he viewed through Goethe. Georg Brandes's main competitor as the pre-eminent Danish literary critic in the 1860s was the conservative Clemens Petersen. For all his continued productivity, Georg Brandes's work as a literary critic reached its peak before the First World War.