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The Aesthetics Of Hunger: Knut Hamsun, Modernism, And Starvation's Global Frame, Timothy Wientzen

English

Exhibiting formal characteristics of works published decades later, Knut Hamsun's Hunger (1890) has long occupied a central position in genealogies of modernism. Its status in the modernist canon, however, has often come at the cost of disregarding the cultural and economic conditions of Hamsun's Norway, which was one of Europe's least developed nations in the nineteenth century. Where critics have tended to treat the hunger that drives Hamsun's novel in terms of the desires and affects of metropolitan modernity, this article instead reads starvation as a transnational historical phenomenon, one that informed wide swaths of the global periphery in the …