Review

Abstract

The co-authors of Ibsen, Scandinavia and the Making of a World Drama are both prominent figures in contemporary Ibsen studies. The historian Narve Fulsås was the editor of the four volumes of Ibsen’s letters for Henrik Ibsens skrifter, the recent critical edition published from 2005 to 2010, and the literary scholar Tore Rem has been the general editor of the newly translated Penguin Classics editions of Ibsen dramas. At the end of their collaborative study, Fulsås and Rem write that they have “wanted to make Ibsen more Scandinavian and more European at the same time” (242). To do this, they advance a corrective argument that explains Ibsen’s Norwegian and Scandinavian contexts not as restrictive environments, but as areas already entangled in the transnational, European sphere of “world literature” in the nineteenth century. They aim to debunk the unquestioned narrative of Ibsen’s success as a liberation or “exile” from nineteenth-century Norway, which has long been understood in an uncritical and ahistorical way, even by Ibsen biographers. In this received story, Norway (and Scandinavia more broadly) was a restrictive location of provincial conservatism from which the self-made, avant-garde Ibsen had to detach himself in order to become a central figure of World Drama. Ibsen, Scandinavia and the Making of a World Drama offers a subtler and more historically situated account of the relationship between Ibsen’s peripheral context of origin and the metropolitan centers of Europe and Britain. The book employs a variety of approaches, including publishing history, book history, examination of the author’s finances, analysis of Scandinavian