Wednesday, May 22, 2013
About Mars Hill Audio
 |  | |
| A sampling of sources: --J. C. Whitehouse, Vertical Man: The Human Being in the Catholic Novels of Graham Greene, Sigrid Undset, and Georges Bernanos (Saint Austin Press, 1999): explores Undset's treatment of her characters --Deal W. Hudson, ed., Sigrid Undset: On Saints and Sinners (Ignatius Press, 1993): a collection of essays about Undset, her writings, and the role faith plays in her works Sigrid Undset: Following the Thread of BeliefThere is a broad consensus on the work of Norwegian writer and Nobel Prize winner Sigrid Undset (1882-1949). "Mainstream" critics deride her for starting out with promise, then losing all literary luster when she converted to Catholicism in 1924, and abandoning the feminist cause. Catholic critics praise her later work as most mature, and rejoice in converting her biography into a passion of return. Norwegians love Undset because . . . She is Norwegian. Currently, however, James Crossely observed in the Review of Contemporary Fiction, "though her Nobel Prize came to her in 1928, there's a certain mustiness about her reputation, as though she'd lived in the era she most famously recorded." The third woman to receive the prestigious award for literary merit—and also the third and last Norwegian—she received the Nobel Prize "principally for her powerful descriptions of Northern life during the Middle Ages." At the banquet of honor, Professor Gösta Forssell remarked, "In her extensive work, an Iliad of the North, Sigrid Undset has resurrected in a new and visionary light the ideals which once guided our forefathers who built that community from which our Germanic culture derived. To an age in which it may be easier to acknowledge that the right to the greatest happiness is the duty of renunciation—to this age Sigrid Undset has shown the ideals of our forefathers: duty and faithfulness." . . . To read the rest of this essay by Jonathan G. Reinhardt, which includes a more complete listing of references, click here. [Posted August 2003, ALG] | Tiina Nunnally, on the prose of Sigrid Undset (MARS HILL AUDIO Journal, Sept./Oct. 2001) MHT-52.2.4 Deal Hudson, on the themes of family in the work of Sigrid Undset, author of Kristin Lavransdatter and The Master of Hestviken (MARS HILL AUDIO Journal, Nov./Dec. 1995) MHT-18.2.2 |