Tag: agrarianism

12,616 words

Chapter 1 of The Law of Civilization and Decay: An Essay on History
Second Edition
New York: The Macmillan Company, 1896 (more…)

Marianne Hamsun, "Portrait of Knut Hamsun," date unknown

2,641 words

After fifty years of being confined to the Orwellian memory hole created by the Jews as part of their European “denazification” process, the work of the Norwegian author Knut Hamsun — who died in 1952 — is reemerging to take its place among the greatest European literature of the twentieth century. All of his major novels have undergone English-language reprints during the last two years, and even in his native Norway, where his post-1945 ostracism has been most severe, he is finally receiving a long-overdue recognition. (more…)

4,583 words

A. R. D. Fairburn, 1904–1957, is not usually identified with the “Right.” As a central figure in the development of a New Zealand national literature, much of the contemporary self-appointed literary establishment would wish to identify Fairburn with Marxism or liberalism, as were other leading literary friends of Fairburn’s such as the Communist R. A. K. Mason. (more…)

2,161 words

Editor’s Note:

The following sketch of Knut Hamsun’s life and work should be supplemented by Mark Deavin’s discussion here of Hamsun’s greatest book, Growth of The Soil, for which he won the Nobel prize for literature. See also Robert Ferguson’s biography Enigma: The Life of Knut Hamsun, 1859–1952.

(more…)

367 words

In 1916 Hamsun began work on what became his greatest and most idealistic novel, Growth of the Soil, which won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1921. It painted Hamsun’s ideal of a solid, farm-based culture, where human values, instead of being fixed upon transitory artificialities which modern society had deemed fashionable, would be based upon the fixed wheel of the seasons in the safekeeping of an inviolable eternity where man and Nature existed in harmony: (more…)