Nietzschean Variations: Politics, Interest, and Education in Ibsen's An Enemy of the People
Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People (1882) has had an unusual reception. Following A Doll’s House (1879) andGhosts (1881), plays that were scandalized upon performance only to be counted, relatively soon, among Ibsen’s most important works, An Enemy of the Peoplewas caught up by history in a different way. While the play has, no doubt, enjoyed bouts of popularity – including the many stagings that followed in thewake of its publication – late twentieth-centurycritics have worried about the political implications of Dr. Stockmann’s elitism and sometimes even compared it to the rhetoric of the later Nationalist Socialistmovement inGermany (Sage 2006, 3–5, 310–311; Ferguson 1996, 280ff ). The kind of elitist sentiments Dr. Stockmann airs inAn Enemy of the People are often associated with the teaching of Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s work was much debated and discussed in Scandinavia when Ibsen was working on the play. Thus, critics have emphasized how Ibsen’s play resonates with a kind of aristocratic pathos that is not unlike the onewe find inwork of theGerman philosopher.While such a reading was prefigured in an essay by Anathon Aall at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, we findmore recent versions of the argument in works by Noreng (1969), de Figueiredo (2007) and Kittang (2005). In his reading ofAn Enemy of the People, Kittang speaks Ibsen Studies, 2014 Vol. 14, No. 2, 109–135, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15021866.2014.1000659
Human, all too human : a book for free spirits
This is the first new translation of both volumes of Nietzsche's Human, All-Too Human to appear since the beginning of the century. The first volume appeared in 1878, just before Nietzsche abandoned his academic life. In 1886 it was republished, incorporating in a second volume two books of aphorisms which Nietzsche had published in the meantime. Subtitled 'A Book for Free Spirits', Human, All Too Human marked for Nietzsche a new 'positivism' and scepticism with which he challenged his previous metaphysical and psychological assumptions. Nearly all the themes of his later work are displayed here with characteristic perceptiveness and honest), - it remains one of the works fundamental for an understanding of his thought.
Victorian Lunatics: A Social Epidemiology of Mental Illness in Mid-Nineteenth Century England
Focusing on the rise in the asylum inmate population during the mid-nineteenth century, this study refutes both the social control theory and the theory that the medical profession manufactured mental illness. It argues instead that a perceived potential cure caused the rapid expansion of government control, which led to the dramatic increase.