It was as a novelist that Strindberg made his definitive, and scandalous, entry into Swedish literature: The Red Room (1879) was only the first in a line of prose works that were to outrage a conservative readership but also, and increasingly, to puzzle a more progressive or radical audience. Hailed as something alarmingly new, The Red Room signalled the somewhat belated entry of Swedish literature into modernity. But the novel was not without precursors and its effectiveness owed much to tradition. One might regard Strindberg's novels and prose fiction as born out of Balzac and Dickens but ending just this side of Kafka. Bearing an epigraph from what Roland Barthes called 'the last happy writer', Voltaire, The Red Room is one of Strindberg's happy works: happy to fight a society that is hypocritical, corrupt and conservative.

Strindberg's novels are restless and versatile, but sometimes also confusing and even tedious. They can be charged with ideological prejudice but are also sharp-eyed anatomies of the modern subject under construction. Sometimes Strindberg uses prose fiction as a means of disseminating ideology; at other times he seems to be learning to speak in these texts, reaching for new literary forms and modes of literary language.

Starting as a traditionalist who learnt to write in such established forms as classical drama and the Icelandic saga, Strindberg was forced to become a modern writer when tradition could neither support him nor allow him to speak out. Journalism became Strindberg’s schooling in modernity, teaching him to sharpen both his gaze and his pen, and to confront different aspects of contemporary society. To say this is to concede that as a writer Strindberg represents the effect of a growing liberalism, both economic and ideological, but in his writing we also encounter what Leo öwenthal called ‘the breakdown of liberal confidence’.