Troubling Legacies: Migration, Modernism and Fascism in the Case of Knut Hamsun

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Modernist troublemaker in the 1890s, Nobel Prize winner in 1920, and indefensible Nazi sympathiser in the 1930s and 40s, Knut Hamsun continues to provoke condemnation, apologia and critical confusion.

Informed by the works of Jacques Derrida and Sigmund Freud, Troubling Legacies analyses the heterogeneous and conflicted legacies of the enigmatic European writer, Hamsun. Moving through different phases of his life, this study emphasises the dislocated nature of Hamsun's works and the diverse and conflicting responses his fiction elicited from such figures as Franz Kafka, Katherine Mansfield, Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger. Close readings of the major novels Hunger, Mysteries, Pan and Growth of the Soil are presented alongside lesser known writings, including his early polemic on America, his turn-of-the-century travelogue through Russia, his fascist polemics of the 1930s and 40s, and his controversial post-war testimony, On Overgrown Paths.

Troubling Legacies links past debates with contemporary literary theory and deconstruction in a way that contributes to critical thinking about political responsibility.

Reviews

Troubling Legacies is at once scholarly and provocative. Peter Sjlyst-Jackson draws in thoughtful and rigorous ways on psychoanalysis and deconstruction (especially the writings of Derrida and de Man) in order to throw new light on our understanding of the modern novel and fascism. He does this by focusing on Knut Hamsun, many of whose novels are easily available in English translation but whose work remains curiously neglected in the English-speaking world. Sjlyst-Jackson foregrounds the extent to which Hamsun's work is in fact bound up with the US (where Hamsun spent a considerable period in the 1880s), and also attends to how he was read by writers as varied as James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield and Franz Kafka. Sjlyst-Jackson's study does an excellent job of bringing out Hamsun's links with mainstream Modernist writers in English, while demonstrating the continuing richness of deconstructive and psychoanalytic thinking for understanding modern literature. -- Professor Nicholas Royle, School of English, University of Sussex, UK

Author Bio

Peter Sjlyst-Jackson teaches modern literature, postcolonial writing and film theory at Birmingham City University, UK.