JACOBSENIANA - J. P. Jacobsen Selskabet - Aarhus Universitet

are brought up for debate, and particulary the following four
statements: 1) that J.P. Jacobsen is an outstanding example of the
Danish or Scandinavian ‘Naturalism’, 2) that Jacobsen is a key
figure of the socalled “Modern Breakthrough” in Danish and
Scandinavian literary history beginning in the 1870es, and thus a
combatant of Georg Brandes’ group of radical artists and intellec-
tuals, 3) that Jacobsen was primarily an athiestic and Darwinistic
writer even when writing fiction, and 4) that Jacobsen was thus to
a certain extent an unsuccessful naturalistic author with an out-
standing and somewhat exaggerated sense for stylistic patterns
and for subjects of decadence or even perversion.
As an editor and scholar of J.P. Jacobsen’s oeuvre and its sig-
nificance for contemporary criticism and literary theory, I cannot
agree with any of these four statements. In my opinion they are
but ideological constructions made especially by Vilhelm Ander-
sen and Paul V. Rubow during the first decades of the 20th cen-
tury.
In my portrait of Jacobsen on the website www.adl.dk I argue
briefly for all of this. I shall extend these arguments in a book on
Jacobsen which I am presently working on. In light of the prob-
lems associated with the aforementioned perspectives, I offer the
following remarks on Jacobsen’s concept of “the nature of man” –
“Menneskenaturen” – in an attempt to revise this part of Danish
literary history.
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