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Ibsen, Strindberg, and Telegony

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Marvin Carlson
Marvin Carlson*
Affiliation:
Indiana UniversityBloomington
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Abstract

During the nineteenth century the phenomenon of heredity was of great interest to artists as well as biologists, but its actual dynamics remained mysterious to both. Some felt that the inheritance of characteristics was to be explained on physiological grounds, some on psychic, and some on a combination of the two. A writer inclined toward scientific materialism like Zola naturally emphasized the physical interpretation of this phenomenon, but Ibsen and Strindberg found the possibility of heredity through psychic means, called telegony by August Weismann, more useful for their aesthetic concerns. Their plays show many varieties of this phenomenon, using telegony in ways related both to contemporary scientific speculation and to a long literary tradition, in which a key work was Goethe's Die Wahlverwandtschaften.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 100 , Issue 5 , October 1985 , pp. 774 - 782
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1985

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