Abstract

Chapter 3 begins by examining Henrik Ibsen's early play St. John's Night and shows how his career as a playwright began by following J.L. Heiberg's aesthetics of autonomy, only to turn away from the latter's cultural politics of reconciliation in his mature production. Given the growing contradiction between capitalist economy and traditional aristocratic values in nineteenth-century Scandinavia, Ibsen in his subsequent Peer Gynt instead chooses to represent this conflict itself through the combination of two distinct literary modes: that of allegory, which the chapter analyses in the context of Karl Marx's theory of exchange-value, and that of the fairy tale, associated with an older, stable worldview in the poem. The irresolvable contradiction between these two representational structures mirrors the avant-gardes' insistence on the ultimate irreconcilability of constitutive parts within a work of art and finds its philosophical foundations in the neo-skeptical conception of experience as inherently fragmented and anarchic.

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