Anna Albrektson examines eighteenth-century Swedish debates about poetry
Anna Albrektson, Professor of Literature at Stockholm University, has published a new article in the context of the Long Quarrel.
Gallery of Views of Ancient Rome, Giovanni Paolo Panini 1758, Louvre Museum
The article is titled 'Horace is dead, but I am alive': Epic Failure and Satiric Authority in Eighteenth-Century Sweden. It is a contribution to the antholgy The Long Quarrel: Past and Present in the Eighteenth Century, edited by Jacques Bos and Jan Rotmans, Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, Vol. 332 (Leiden: Brill, 2021).
In her article Anna Albrektson examines eighteenth-century Swedish debates about poetry in the context of the Long Quarrel, analyzing the work of two eighteenth-century poets – Samuel Triewald and Bengt Lidner – and their use of the French seventeenth-century poet Nicolas Boileau.
Anna Albrektson. Photo: Ingmarie Andersson / Stockholm University
Her contribution reveals that, over the course of the eighteenth century, Boileau’s reputation underwent radical changes in Sweden, from a brilliant poet to a rigid legislator of poetry, while a broader question arose: can outstanding poetry be written in Swedish, a small language from a remote part of Europe? As Albrektson makes clear, the entangled positions of Ancients and Moderns in the Long Quarrel may defy straightforward classification, but they nevertheless created the conditions for new approaches to poetry.
