Den besjälade naturen – naturpoesi och landskapsmåleri i 1890-talets Sverige. Symbolism och naturromantik hos Gustaf Fröding och prins Eugen.

Abstract

The following thesis deals with the motif of nature and landscape within Swedish poetry and visual arts in the 1890s. The aesthetic change at the end of the 1880s towards a style, which more and more sought the opposition to naturalism and realism, serves as the starting point in my thesis. Based on that, the aim of my thesis is to examine the new emerging aesthetics within the fields of poetry and visual arts from an interdisciplinary and transnational perspective. Therefore, the contemporary French aesthetic trends and tendencies are compared with the dominant Swedish ones at that time. Focus here lies on trends regarding the symbolism and its related style, the style of romanticism, from the late 18th century within the symbolistic movement. Equally, the close relationship between poetry and visual art as well as the reduction of the borders of distinctive art categories, as a phenomenon of the new aesthetics, is explored. In order to emphasize the transnational and the international aesthetic interrelations, the main focus lays on the analysis and interpretation of both a poem, Gustaf Fröding’s “I skogen”, 1891, and a painting, prince Eugen’s “Skogen”, 1892. Likewise, literary and aesthetic theoretical sources also undergo a detailed investigation in order to examine their effects on the corresponding artificial expressions. The chosen nature poem and the chosen landscape painting are tested on their relevance and their function for the anti-naturalistic style. I question and challenge the reading of the period in general, especially the examined works of art, as an expression for the Swedish romantic nationalism such as it is often classified and ranged in earlier research contributions. Instead I argue for aesthetic ideas and theories that circulated across national borders. My focus, particularly, is thereby placed on the transfer between France and Sweden.