Modern Breakthrough - Course of Events

Course of Events

The very beginning of The Modern Breakthrough is usually attributed Georg Brandes, who already in 1869 translated the controversial essay The Subjection of Women by John Stuart Mill into Danish. In the following years, Brandes lectured at Copenhagen University and after that in most of Europe with criticism of romanticism. He also wrote books and articles on the subject, and especially Main Currents in 19th Century Literature, which was published in several volumes from 1872 important as a theoretical basis for the literature of the time.

A number of the other authors of the period had international contacts, and many of them lived abroad in shorter periods. In this way, there were small colonies of Scandinavian artists in cities such as Paris, Berlin and Rome, and some of the artists published literature directly in foreign languages. In any case, their works were translated much faster than previously, and the movement thus had its breakthrough.

In the 1890s, the movement was in part replaced by Symbolism, originating in many of the authors' interest in subjects of a religious or spiritual nature. But the realism in the Modern Breakthrough has influenced later authors such as Selma Lagerlöf, Johannes V. Jensen and Martin Andersen Nexø in the following years (1900–1920), which some call the popular breakthrough (Danish: "Det Folkelige Gennembrud"), because the authors in this period write about the lower rungs of society, e.g. Martin Andersen Nexø's Pelle the Conqueror, filmatized in 1987.

The cultural radical movement of the 1920-1940 is often characterized as the continuation of the Modern Breakthrough, or the Modern Breakthrough as the beginning of Cultural Radicalism.