This book presents English translations of eight of the comedies Holberg wrote for the Lille Grønnegade Theatre in Copenhagen in the 1720s. The most extensive collection of Holberg plays available in English, the translation and other materials are based on research materials not available to earlier translators and are thus more accurate.

Ludvig Holberg (1684–1754) was the foremost representative of the Danish-Norwegian Enlightenment and also a European figure of note. He published significant works in natural law and history, but also a very important body of moral essays and epistles. He authored several engaging autobiographies and European travelogues, a major utopian novel that was an immediate European succes, interesting satires that advocated women’s education and career, and a large number of comedies. These comedies secured Holberg’s status as the most significant playwright in Scandinavia before Ibsen and Strindberg. Through his extensive oeuvre, but especially through his plays, Holberg had a decisive influence on the formation of modern Danish as a literary language, something that was a self-conscious effort on the part of a man who saw himself as an educator of the public. Despite his contemporary impact at home and abroad and his ongoing popularity in Scandinavia, he remains little known in the wider world of enlightenment studies. It is the aim of this volume to revive Holberg as a major figure from a minor corner of the Enlightenment world by presenting the full variety of his work and giving it a European context.

Despite being a minor language, Danish literature is one of the world's most actively translated, and the Scandinavian country is the home of a number of significant writers. Hans Christian Andersen remains one of the most translated authors in the world, philosopher Søren Kierkegaard inspired modern Existentialism, Karen Blixen chronicled her life in colonial Kenya as well as writing imaginary, cosmopolitan tales, and the writers among the circles of literary critic Georg Brandes in the late 19th century were especially important to the further development of European Modernism. Danish Literature as World Literature introduces key figures from 800 years of Danish literature and their impact on world literature. It includes chapters devoted to post-1945 literature on beat and systemic poetry as well as the Scandinavia noir vogue that includes both crime fiction and cinema and is enjoying worldwide popularity.

While Kierkegaard is perhaps known best as a religious thinker and philosopher, there is an unmistakable literary element in his writings. He often explains complex concepts and ideas by using literary figures and motifs that he could assume his readers would have some familiarity with. This dimension of his thought has served to make his writings far more popular than those of other philosophers and theologians, but at the same time it has made their interpretation more complex. Kierkegaard readers are generally aware of his interest in figures such as Faust or the Wandering Jew, but they rarely have a full appreciation of the vast extent of his use of characters from different literary periods and traditions. The present volume is dedicated to the treatment of the variety of literary figures and motifs used by Kierkegaard. The volume is arranged alphabetically by name, with Tome II covering figures and motifs from Gulliver to Zerlina.

Ludvig Holberg is the most important man of letters in eighteenth-century Denmark-Norway and is often referred to as the father of Danish and Norwegian Literature, the Molière of the North, the founder of Scandinavian drama, or even as the first Scandinavian feminist. In all his writings - apart from being a dramatist in his own right - he excelled as a satirist, historian and essayist, Holberg is a true child of the Enlightenment advocating tolerance and moderation. At the same time, however, he transgressed its parameters. He introduced a series of classical genres but also violated their rules; he generally supported absolute monarchy but criticized its deficiencies, sometimes with subtlety, sometimes openly and relentlessly when, for instance, aiming his satire at the outdated educational system. Above all, Holberg was a towering cosmopolitan figure in eighteenth-century intellectual life, extremely well-read not only in the classics but also in contemporary literature. Furthermore, he was one of the most avid travelers of his time. He saw himself foremost as a European writer, attacking provincialism and narrow-mindedness wherever he encountered it. Holberg was strongly influenced by the European intellectual tradition and, in return also impacted literary trends abroad. This volume, written by experts from various countries, attempts to place Holberg in this international context. It highlights both the European influence on him and the influence he exerted in his own time as well as the fascination he holds to this very day because of his probing, critical mind, complex personality and, above all, because of the purely artistic quality and modernity found particularly in his immortal comedies.

While Kierkegaard is perhaps known best as a religious thinker and philosopher, there is an unmistakable literary element in his writings. He often explains complex concepts and ideas by using literary figures and motifs that he could assume his readers would have some familiarity with. This dimension of his thought has served to make his writings far more popular than those of other philosophers and theologians, but at the same time it has made their interpretation more complex. Kierkegaard readers are generally aware of his interest in figures such as Faust or the Wandering Jew, but they rarely have a full appreciation of the vast extent of his use of characters from different literary periods and traditions. The present volume is dedicated to the treatment of the variety of literary figures and motifs used by Kierkegaard. The volume is arranged alphabetically by name, with Tome I covering figures and motifs from Agamemnon to Guadalquivir.

For over a century, the Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55) has been at the center of a number of important discussions, concerning not only philosophy and theology, but also, more recently, fields such as social thought, psychology, and contemporary aesthetics, especially literary theory. Despite his relatively short life, Kierkegaard was an extraordinarily prolific writer, as attested to by the 26-volume Princeton University Press edition of all of his published writings. But Kierkegaard left behind nearly as much unpublished writing, most of which consists of what are called his "journals and notebooks." Kierkegaard has long been recognized as one of history's great journal keepers, but only rather small portions of his journals and notebooks are what we usually understand by the term “diaries.” By far the greater part of Kierkegaard’s journals and notebooks consists of reflections on a myriad of subjects—philosophical, religious, political, personal. Studying his journals and notebooks takes us into his workshop, where we can see his entire universe of thought. We can witness the genesis of his published works, to be sure—but we can also see whole galaxies of concepts, new insights, and fragments, large and small, of partially (or almost entirely) completed but unpublished works. Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks enables us to see the thinker in dialogue with his times and with himself. Kierkegaard wrote his journals in a two-column format, one for his initial entries and the second for the extensive marginal comments that he added later. This edition of the journals reproduces this format, includes several photographs of original manuscript pages, and contains extensive scholarly commentary on the various entries and on the history of the manuscripts being reproduced. Volume 9 of this 11-volume series includes five of Kierkegaard’s important “NB” journals (Journals NB26 through NB30), which span from June 1852 to August 1854. This period was marked by Kierkegaard’s increasing preoccupation with what he saw as an unbridgeable gulf in Christianity—between the absolute ideal of the religion of the New Testament and the official, state-sanctioned culture of “Christendom,” which, embodied by the Danish People’s Church, Kierkegaard rejected with increasing vehemence. Crucially, Kierkegaard’s nemesis, Bishop Jakob Peter Mynster, died during this period and, in the months following, Kierkegaard can be seen moving inexorably toward the famous “attack on Christendom” with which he ended his life.

This interdisciplinary study establishes connections between divergent approaches to rationality in philosophy, social science, and literary studies. Livingston provides a broad survey of the basic assumptions and questions associated with concepts of rationality in philosophical accounts of action, in decision theory, and in the theory of rational choice.