This chapter examines consistent patterns and changing trends in British representations of Scandinavia throughout the nineteenth century. It demonstrates how Scandinavia became not only an alternative destination for British travellers but also the source of new literary forms and motifs which inspired and fuelled contemporary debates in British society. Its case studies are Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), Harriet Martineau’s Feats on the Fjord (1841), and Maria Sharpe Pearson’s writings on Ibsen’s work published in the British press (1889–94). These texts demonstrate the growing attraction of the Scandinavian landscape and the so-called cultural (re)discovery of Old Norse literature and mythology as well as Scandinavia’s rising literary reputation from the 1880s onwards thanks to the international impact of realist and naturalist works by Scandinavian authors, notably Henrik Ibsen. Ultimately Scandinavia offered the ‘allure of accessible difference’ as the region was and continues to be perceived as both geographically and culturally close – and yet far away.

Chapter 2 addresses Komediehuset in Bergen, Norway in its 1850–1909 iteration. Built by an amateur dramatic society in 1800 and destroyed by a 1944 British bombing raid, it has a twofold historical importance: it housed the first professional Norwegian theatre company and it is where the young Henrik Ibsen learned his craft. We consider the theatre’s high point as a social space for audiences and artists to create a national identity for the emerging state of Norway. This chapter focuses on set design, specifically in Olaf Liljekrans, an early play by Ibsen. Via performance labs in conjunction with artists, actors, and a designer, we analyse how Ibsen used space and movement to elucidate the discourses within his plays. In the famous social dramas written after he left Norway, Ibsen perfected this technique of writing meanings into bodies and imaginary stage spaces. The chapter illustrates Komediehuset’s role in the birth of Norwegian nationalism on stage and the beginnings of modern drama.

Chapter 5 discusses claims that different norms govern translation and the nature of translated text in different temporal and geographical contexts, and that translated texts differ from first-written texts. It considers the troubled relationship between the notions of norms and translation universals, and addresses the question of what constitutes a translation ‘proper’, and what characterizes the task a translator takes on when translating a piece of literature. It gives an account of the variety of approaches and attitudes taken to this task since Ancient Roman times, through to the work of Gideon Toury on translation laws and later developments that this has inspired, including work on norms, the nature of translated text, and translation universals. Translations and retranslations into English of Henrik Ibsen’s plays are used for purposes of illustration.

Chapter 1: This chapter starts by tracing the development of objectivity in both science and theatre through classical and early modern theatre, in which it was a fairly unimportant epistemic virtue, into the late eighteenth century where objectivity begins to emerge through the idealizations of ‘Truth-to-Nature’ in biology and in literary and theatrical Romanticism. Although some conceptions of scientific objectivity and observation treat these as virtuous by the extent to which they rise above personal or historical bias, the practice and theory of both objectivity and observation have changed through history. Drawing on the work of Lorraine Daston and others, the chapter goes on to show that the emergence of modern (‘mechanical’) objectivity, and a new relationship with observation, mark both nineteenth-century science and Naturalist theatre. Making the comparison explains some of the antitheatrical claims of Naturalist authors and the contradictions of Naturalist practice. As nineteenth-century ‘objectivity’ is superseded, so the theatrical figuration of science gravitates towards areas of ambiguity, chaos, and indeterminacy.