Strindberg and the Poetry of Myth

Strindberg and the Poetry of Myth by Harry G. Carlson offers a bold reappraisal of August Strindberg, situating him not only as Sweden’s national author and Ibsen’s chief rival on the world stage but also as a dramatist whose enduring power derives from his mythic imagination. While Strindberg’s contemporaries and later critics often accused him of excessive subjectivity, Carlson argues that the seemingly autobiographical intensity of his plays, novels, and poems gains resonance through the structural use of myth. From his early naturalist dramas such as The Father, Miss Julie, and Creditors to the visionary symbolic works To Damascus, A Dream Play, and The Ghost Sonata, Strindberg fused raw detail drawn from life with archetypal images drawn from classical, biblical, and Norse traditions. His characters are not only figures of personal confession but mythic protagonists whose struggles dramatize the universal conflict between aspiration, betrayal, and human limitation.

Carlson traces Strindberg’s lifelong engagement with myth, beginning with his early fascination with heroic figures like Jason and Heracles and culminating in the polyphonic mythmaking of his late dream plays, where a single character may resonate simultaneously with Christ, the Wandering Jew, Lucifer, and Everyman. By reading Strindberg’s work through this mythic grammar, Carlson demonstrates how the playwright transformed private turmoil into dramas of archetypal significance, achieving a poetic texture that is at once intensely personal and broadly universal. Both a critical study and an interpretive synthesis, Strindberg and the Poetry of Myth illuminates the symbolic dimensions of a body of work that continues to fascinate, unsettle, and inspire audiences and readers across the modern world.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1982.