From artistic consecration to degradation: The case of Sven Hassel

Abstract

Sociologists often neglect aesthetic and moral factors in explaining the rise and fall of artists’ reputations. Their focus has often been on more ostentatiously “sociological” variables such as politics, networks, organizations, and power. In this study we make central a pollution dynamic and explore the overlooked phenomenon of “literary degradation.” We identify two pathways—the downward aesthetic and downward moral classification. We exemplify both these pathways on the case of the Danish writer known as Sven Hassel, once an acclaimed new writer compared to Hemingway in the 1950s. Yet by the 1970s his books were generally seen as militaristic pulp flirting with Nazi sympathies. We show the forces of degradation are divergently activated according to context.