Georg Brandes (4 February 1842 - 19 February 1927), born Morris Cohen, was a Danish critic and scholar who greatly influenced Scandinavian and European literature from the 1870s through the turn of the 20th century. He is seen as the theorist behind the "Modern Breakthrough" of Scandinavian culture. At the age of 30, Brandes formulated the principles of a new realism and naturalism, condemning hyper-aesthetic writing and also fantasy in literature. His literary goals were shared by some other authors, among them the Norwegian "realist" playwright Henrik Ibsen.

Among his later writings must be mentioned the monographs on Soren Kierkegaard (1877), Esaias Tegner (1878), Benjamin Disraeli (1878), Ferdinand Lassalle (in German, 1877), Ludvig Holberg (1884), Henrik Ibsen (1899) and on Anatole France (1905). Brandes wrote with great depth on the main contemporary poets and novelists of Denmark and Norway, and he and his disciples were for a long time the arbiters of literary success in the north. His Danish Poets (1877), containing studies of Carsten Hauch, Ludvig Bodtcher, Christian Winther and Frederick Paludan-Muller, his Men of the Modern Transition (1883), and his Essays (1889), are volumes essential to the proper study of modern Scandinavian literature. He wrote an excellent book on Poland (1888; English translation, 1903), and was one of the editors of the German version of Ibsen. The most important of his later works was his study of William Shakespeare (1897-1898), which was translated into English by William Archer and was highly acclaimed. It was, perhaps, history's most authoritative work on Shakespeare not principally intended for an English-speaking audience. He was afterwards engaged in writing a history of modern Scandinavian literature. In his critical work, which extended over a wider field than that of any other living writer, Brandes was aided by a singularly charming style, lucid and reasonable, enthusiastic but without extravagance, brilliant and colored without affectation. In 1900 he collected his works for the first time in a complete and popular edition and began to work on a German edition, completed in 1902. He published Main Currents in Nineteenth-Century Literature in 1906 (six volumes). This book was among the 100 best books for education selected in 2008 by Will Durant. Durant and Brandes were both contributors to the Mother Earth magazine. In Volume 2 Brandes says about Kierkegaard, "It is not merely in name that this irony bears a fundamental resemblance to Kierkegaard's, which also aristocratically "chooses to be misunderstood". The Ego of genius is the truth, if not in the sense in which Kierkegaard would have us understand his proposition, "Subjectivity is the truth", still in the sense that the Ego has every externally valid commandment and prohibition in its power; and, to the astonishment and scandal of the world, invariably expresses itself in paradoxes. Irony is "divine audacity". In audacity thus comprehended there are endless possibilities. It is freedom from prejudice, yet it suggests the possibility of the most audacious defense of all possible kinds of prejudices. It is more easily attainable, we are told, by woman than by man. "Like the feminine garb, the feminine intellect has this advantage over the masculine, that its possessor by a single daring movement can rise above all the prejudices of civilization and bourgeois conventionality, at once transporting herself into the state of innocence and the lap of Nature". The lap of Nature! There is an echo of Rousseau's voice even in this wanton tirade. We seem to hear the trumpet-call of revolution; what we really hear is only the proclamation of reaction. Rousseau desired to return to the state of nature, when men roamed naked through the pathless forests and lived upon acorns. Schelling wished to turn the course of evolution back to the primeval ages, to the days before man had fallen. Schlegel blows revolutionary melodies on the great romantic "wonder-horn". CANNOTANSWER

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