| Abstrakt: |
The Modern Breakthrough marks an important turn towards realism in Scandinavian literature, and is broadly recognized as one of the most important periods in modern Nordic literary history. Georg Brandes's lectures on main currents in nineteenth century European literature at the University of Copenhagen and his later work Det moderne gennembruds mænd (1883) provided the foundations for understanding this important movement. While his lectures grounded his appeals for naturalism in developments in European literature, his portraits of the male authors he considered to be at the core of the Modern Breakthrough offered a touchstone for a deeper understanding of this movement. One hundred years after the publication of Brandes's work, Pil Dahlerup published an important corrective to it, with her Det moderne gennembruds kvinder, a series of portraits and analyses of late nineteenth century female authors largely overlooked by the deeply biased literary establishment of the time. A great deal of scholarship on the Modern Breakthrough considers the rich network of literary cross-influence that characterized the period. Influence, however, is a complex phenomenon and one that is hard to formalize. In the following work, we propose to explore the related phenomenon of similarity, predicated on the notion that the most sincere form of flattery is imitation. To what extent do writers from this period share aspects of language? Can we capture this sharing in a useful manner computationally? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
