BiblioVault - Books about 1849-1912

Harriet Bosse

Strindberg's Muse and Interpreter

Carla Waal

Southern Illinois University Press, 1990

Harriet Bosse, a delicate beauty with rich theatrical talent, wasan inspiration for the prominent and controversial playwright August Strindberg. After their three-year marriage collapsed, she became his interpreter to the world, guardian of the Strindberg legend. This first biography of Harriet Bosse in English explores her own important career as an actress on the Swedish stage, as well as her influence on Strindberg’s work. Waal has separated Harriet Bosse from her romanticized image in the shadow of August Strindberg and has shown her as a person, fascinating and self-sufficient. Her daughter-in-law Randi Wingård said: "Harriet was a great personality, and even if she was tiny, one could nothelp noticing her in any gathering. She attracted everyone’s attention." While tracing the development of Bosse’s career, her triumphs and disappointments, Waal chronicles the beginnings of Swedish filmmaking in early silent films as well as four decades of major developments in Swedish theatre. But Bosse’s marriage to Strindberg and her relationship to his writing are an integral part of her story, and Waal also details the couple’s stormy marriage, from 1901 to 1903, the reasons for its failure, and the personal and career influences they continued to exert on each other. As Strindberg’s inspiration for many literary works, Bosse was alternately vilified and idealized. Much of what Strindberg wrote after meeting Bosse reflects his adoration of her and his despair over the problems of their relationship. She inspired two of his major works of poetry, "The Golden Eagle" and "The Dutchman," in addition to the character of the virgin princess in Swan White. On stage she played eight minor and six major Strindberg roles, including Indra’s Daughter in A Dream Play and Christina in Queen Christina.

Much information for this book is drawn from previously inaccessible sources, including unpublished materials in libraries, archives, and private collections, mostly in Scandinavia. Waal interviewed Strindberg and Bosse’s daughter Anne Marie Wyller Hagelin (to whom the book is dedicated) as well as other members of Bosse’s family and a wide range of actors, critics, directors, and scholars. Forty-one photographs are included in the text.

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The International Strindberg

New Critical Essays

Anna Westerståhl Stenport

Northwestern University Press, 2012

This fine collection of essays offers a wide range of new and original perspectives on Strindberg and his relation to modern and contemporary literature. By using Strindberg as a fulcrum or spring board, the volume opens a unique and unusual historical perspective on Europe and European literature. One of the important values of The International Strindberg is that it will appeal to a variety of readers, since the essays cover such a diverse range of approaches. The introduction is particularly impressive because it both sets up the value of looking at Strindberg from a twenty-first century perspective and suggests how that can and should be done. The volume demonstrates the variety of ways in which Strindberg’s work can be seen and discussed in light of twentieth and even twenty-first century literature.

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Picturing Ourselves

Photography and Autobiography

Linda Haverty Rugg

University of Chicago Press, 1997

Photography has transformed the way we picture ourselves. Although photographs seem to "prove" our existence at a given point in time, they also demonstrate the impossibility of framing our multiple and fragmented selves. As Linda Haverty Rugg convincingly shows, photography's double take on self-image mirrors the concerns of autobiographers, who see the self as simultaneously divided (in observing/being) and unified by the autobiographical act.

Rugg tracks photography's impact on the formation of self-image through the study of four literary autobiographers concerned with the transformative power of photography. Obsessed with self-image, Mark Twain and August Strindberg both attempted (unsuccessfully) to integrate photographs into their autobiographies. While Twain encouraged photographers, he was wary of fakery and kept a fierce watch on the distribution of his photographic image. Strindberg, believing that photographs had occult power, preferred to photograph himself.

Because of their experiences under National Socialism, Walter Benjamin and Christa Wolf feared the dangerously objectifying power of photographs and omitted them from their autobiographical writings. Yet Benjamin used them in his photographic conception of history, which had its testing ground in his often-ignored Berliner Kindheit um 1900. And Christa Wolf's narrator in Patterns of Childhood attempts to reclaim her childhood from the Nazis by reconstructing mental images of lost family photographs.

Confronted with multiple and conflicting images of themselves, all four of these writers are torn between the knowledge that texts, photographs, and indeed selves are haunted by undecidability and the desire for the returned glance of a single self.

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Selected Plays, Volume I

August Strindberg

University of Minnesota Press, 2012

August Strindberg is often considered the father of modern Swedish literature. His vast output of plays was innovative in style and form. Volume 1 of Selected Plays presents selections from the beginning of his career, before Strindberg’s period of psychotic attacks in the 1890s. Master Olof (1872) is a historical drama set in early Reformation Sweden, influenced by Ibsen and Shakespeare. Two of his most produced plays today, The Father (1887) and Miss Julie (1888), are examples of his naturalistic plays. Strindberg described Creditors (1888), a tragicomedy, as his “most mature work.” The Stronger (1889), a playlet, is a favorite in acting classes. Playing with Fire (1893) is one of his few comedies. These plays deal with Strindberg’s preoccupation with power struggles and sexual warfare.

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Selected Plays, Volume II

August Strindberg

University of Minnesota Press, 2012

This second volume of the great Swedish writer August Strindberg’s plays begins with To Damascus I (1898), the first of a trilogy. It mirrors his own departure from the naturalism he had explored in several of his earlier works, as he set forth on a spiritual odyssey. Crimes and Crimes (1899), from the beginning of his symbolist mode, is a lighter take on the themes in To Damascus I. The first of a two-part play, Dance of Death I (1900) depicts a dysfunctional marriage. A Dream Play (1901), which is one of Strindberg’s most influential, shows reality converted into a dream; many critics consider it his greatest play. In 1907, Strindberg founded the Intimate Theater in Stockholm; The Ghost Sonata (1907) and The Pelican (1907), which were written for its opening, are two examples of a chamber play, a genre that Strindberg helped to originate.

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Strindberg's Letters

August Strindberg

University of Chicago Press, 1992

This is the first major collection in English of August Strindberg's letters, the most vital and wide-ranging body of correspondence in Scandinavian literature. Of ten thousand surviving letters, Michael Robinson has selected and translated more than five hundred of the most important, which trace Strindberg's development and provide a comprehensive view of the life and work of this towering figure in European literary and theatrical Modernism.

Strindberg's plays, novels, and short stories, which influenced film and theatre artists from Artaud and the German Expressionists to Ingmar Bergman and Woody Allen, chart an artistic evolution from Naturalism to the revolt against realism that issued in Expressionist drama. These letters help to explain Strindberg's seminal force and testify to the broad range of his interests, energies, and imaginative instincts. An essential part of their author's oeuvre, the letters provide invaluable insight into Strindberg the artist, the political thinker, and the person, and were regarded by Strindberg himself as an integral component of his autobiographical project.

The letters, some of them published here for the first time, have been meticulously edited and are supported by an extensive introduction and notes.

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Strindberg's Letters, Volume 1

1862-1892

August Strindberg

University of Chicago Press, 1992

This is the first major collection in English of August Strindberg's letters, the most vital and wide-ranging body of correspondence in Scandinavian literature. Of ten thousand surviving letters, Michael Robinson has selected and translated more than five hundred of the most important, which trace Strindberg's development and provide a comprehensive view of the life and work of this towering figure in European literary and theatrical Modernism.

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Strindberg's Letters, Volume 2

1892-1912

August Strindberg

University of Chicago Press, 1992

This is the first major collection in English of August Strindberg's letters, the most vital and wide-ranging body of correspondence in Scandinavian literature. Of ten thousand surviving letters, Michael Robinson has selected and translated more than five hundred of the most important, which trace Strindberg's development and provide a comprehensive view of the life and work of this towering figure in European literary and theatrical Modernism.

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