Knut Hamsun, Sult [Hunger]

Wayne Stables (Trinity College Dublin)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.3.5: Norwegian Writing and Culture.
Vol. editors: Kjerstin Moody (Gustavus Adolphus College), Sven Hakon Rossel (Universitat Wien), Herbert Rowland (Purdue University), Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen (University College London), Anja Tröger (University of Edinburgh)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1890

Places

Norway (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

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Knut Hamsun’s (1859 –1952)

Hunger

is one of the most remarkable experiments in 19th Century prose. Begun in the wake of a return to Copenhagen from America and finished in Kristiania (now Oslo), Hamsun’s most widely read novel is concerned with “the strange and peculiar life of the mind, the mysteries of the nerves in a starving body” (Letters 1, 118). The first fragment, published anonymously in the Copenhagen journal

Ny Jord

(New Earth) in November 1888, reveals a reorientation of Hamsun’s thinking that takes shape in a new commitment to “reveal oneself nakedly” (Hamsun qtd. Ferguson 101). Though the fragment, later reworked as the second part of

Hunger

, shares many of the characteristic concerns (or generalisations) that will come to define literary modernism, its style…

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1843 words

Citation: Stables, Wayne. "Sult". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 11 February 2010 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=24881, accessed 23 April 2024.]

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