Hunger is a novel by the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun, published in 1890, narrated in the first person by an unnamed, starving young writer wandering the streets of Kristiania, present-day Oslo, as he tries and repeatedly fails to sell his writing, pawns his few possessions, and endures increasingly severe physical and mental effects of prolonged hunger while clinging to an eccentric, self-destructive code of pride that leads him to refuse food or charity even when it is offered. Told with almost no conventional plot, the novel instead follows the narrator's fragmenting, often hallucinatory consciousness in close detail, anticipating the interior, psychologically driven narration later associated with literary modernism. Hamsun wrote the novel explicitly against the social-realist and naturalist fiction dominant in Scandinavian letters at the time, aiming instead to render the irrational, subconscious movements of the mind rather than external social conditions or plot. Hunger is widely credited as an early landmark of psychological modernism in fiction, and its influence has been traced in later writers including Franz Kafka and Ernest Hemingway.
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Original Language Composed, From (Year) FAQs
Where did Hunger first appear before the 1890 novel, and how was it received?
It began as a sketch in the Danish periodical New Earth in 1888 and drew immediate widespread attention.
According to Edwin Björkman, who wrote the introduction to George Egerton's English translation as presented by Project Gutenberg, Hunger in its original form was merely a sketch, and it appeared in 1888 in a Danish literary periodical, New Earth. Björkman writes that it attracted immediate widespread attention to the author because of its unusual theme and striking form. He adds that when the completed novel appeared in 1890, Knut Hamsun was greeted as one of the chief heralds of the neo-romantic movement then spreading rapidly through the Scandinavian north.
What kind of realism does Hunger practise?
Björkman calls it a psychological realism that does not photograph details, closer to Impressionism.
Edwin Björkman, in his introduction to the Project Gutenberg edition of George Egerton's translation, calls it a new kind of realism that had nothing to do with photographic reproduction of details. He describes it as a professedly psychological study, comparing its picture of the mind to the delirious utterances of a fever patient, and says it presented life in the Impressionistic temper of a Gauguin or Cézanne.
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Source Wikipedia: Hunger (Hamsun novel)
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Also in Language Atlas: the original language of this subject.
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Sources
1. Wikipedia: Hunger (Hamsun novel)
Lead paragraph, language clause
Hunger (Norwegian: Sult) is a novel by the Norwegian author Knut Hamsun
Publication history section
An extract from Hunger was first published anonymously in the Danish magazine Ny Jord in November 1888.
Lead paragraph, publication clause
Hunger (Norwegian: Sult) is a novel by the Norwegian author Knut Hamsun published in 1890
Lead
is a novel by the Norwegian author Knut Hamsun published in 1890 by P.G. Philipsens Forlag.
In Genre: The Novel, Lead section
Hunger (Norwegian: Sult) is a novel by the Norwegian author Knut Hamsun published in 1890 by P.G.
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