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| Fall of the King
ISBN: 9780816678945
Platform/Publisher: Ebook Central / University of Minnesota Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Limited; Download: 7 Days at a Time
Subjects: Fiction; Literature;
Taking place during the first half of the sixteenth century, The Fall of the King tells the story of dreamy, slacking student Mikkel Th(c)gersen and the entanglements that ultimately bring him into service as a mercenary under King Christian II of Denmark. Moving from the Danish countryside to Stockholm during the execution of Swedish nobility and finally to the imprisonment of Mikkel and Christian, the narrative is a lyrical encapsulation of OC the fallOCOOCothe fall of country, history, individuals, and nature. Twice voted as the most important Danish novel of the twentieth century, The Fall of the King is both an epic depiction of real events and a complex psychological novel. Half pure narration, half prose poem, its scenes of brute realism mixed with rhapsodical passages make it a work of artistic genius."
Johannes V. Jensen has had great influence on Danish literature both as a lyric poet and as a novelist. He was born in a village in northwestern Jutland, where his father was a veterinarian and his grandfather a farmer and weaver. His early short stories, Himmerland Stories (1904, 1910), depict this world of his childhood. Jensen studied medicine in Copenhagen but did not become a doctor. His great interest in anthropology and biology was concentrated in the theory of evolution. An optimist, Jensen wrote a series of myths, each portraying the same movement: the present is the culmination of all that has been in the past. This positive Darwinian philosophy permeates the six novels that comprise his epic The Long Journey (1908--22). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1944. (Bowker Author Biography) |
