Niels Lyhne
A new edition of Jens Peter Jacobsen's 1880 masterpiece, Niels Lyhne. The story centers on Niels Lyhne, a young artist who struggles with and renounces his faith, and his various failures as a lover and as an artist, losses, and disillusionments leading to his eventual death. Niels Lyhne is as much a critique of atheism as it is of faith, as critic Georg Lukacs observed, making it the "first novel to describe [the] state of mind of the atheistic bourgeois intelligentsia." Niels Lyhne is a naturalistic work and is considered to be one of the most important literary contributions to the "Modern Breakthrough" movement in nineteenth century Denmark -- a distinctly Scandinavian school of realism, "breaking" away from romanticism. While Jens Peter Jacobsen's Niels Lyhne has long been considered one of the greatest novels within Danish literary cultural canon, it has often wrongfully been left out of in conversations regarding the "greatest" works of European literature. Yet, it is receiving renewed appreciation and attention as an overlooked masterpiece, worthy of being evaluated alongside similar naturalistic works by Emile Zola, Gustave Flaubert, Albert Camus, Jack London, Stephen Crane, or Theodore Dreiser. This edition is based on the 1919 translation by Hanna Astrup Larsen (1873-1945) for the American-Scandinavian Foundation. Jens Peter Jacobsen (1847 – 1885) was a Danish novelist, poet, and scientist, often publishing just under the name "J. P. Jacobsen." He is considered to be the founder of the naturalist movement in Danish literature and a key leader of the Modern Breakthrough. Originally finding success as a scientist, Jacobsen was the author of an early Danish translation of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Spies and The Descent of Man. As a writer of fiction, he was the author of Fru Marie Grubbe (1876), a ground-breaking work in its depiction of the downfall of a Danish noblewomen that is evocative of the later works of D.H. Lawrence, Niels Lyhne (1880), the story of an atheist struggling in a merciless world that is evocative of the later works of Albert Camus, and the short-story collection Mogens og andre Noveller (1882). Our Scandinavian Classics Collection is dedicated to preserving and highlighting the best and most significant classic works of Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, and Icelandic literature in English translation, including works by Ludvig Holberg, Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Björnstjerne Björnson, Snorri Sturlson, Jens Peter Jacobsen, Knut Hamsun, Hans Christian Andersen, Adam Oehlenschläger, Martin Andersen Nexø, Selma Lagerlöf, Sigrid Undset, and many more.