Einar Haugen

Norway's Ole Bull led one of the most remarkable lives of the 19th century. Colourful and charismatic, he was a composer and virtuoso violinist who won acclaim from Moscow to Alexandria to Chicago and promoted himself and the culture of Norway with a flair that rivalled P.T. Barnum. A child prodigy, Bull was admitted to the Bergen orchestra as first violin at the age of eight. He soon was idolized on both sides of the Atlantic for his superb improvizations and his ability to play the violin polyphonically. Though he was hailed as ""the Paganini of the North"", some critics labelled him a charlatan. Bull counted among his friends many of the great names of his era: Schumann and Liszt, Twain and Thackeray. Longfellow and Hans Christian Anderson modelled characters on him, and he was in part the inspiration for Ibsen's ""Peer Gynt"". Although he spent most of his adult life abroad, Bull tirelessly promoted Norwegian art and culture. His concert improvizations were rooted on his native ""slatter"" (folkdances), and he modified his own instrument using the Norwegian Hardanger fiddle as a model. By mid-century, Bull realized his dream of establishing a national theatre in Bergen. He gave Henrik Ibsen a start in theatre management, employed the poet Bjornstjerne Bjorksen, and promoted the music of Edvard Grieg. His attempt to establish a Norwegian colony, ""Oleana"", in the Unied States, however, failed. The words of the poet Aasmund Vinje, ""That surely would be a man to write a book about"", have been taken to heart by authors Einar Haugen and Camilla Cai. In addition to providing the first comprehensive listing of Bull's works (with full descriptions of all known sources), analyses of his compositions and their influences, and reviews of his performances, this biography gives life once again to a fascinating and flamboyant figure.

No detailed description available for "Blessings of Babel".

Ibsen's Drama was first published in 1979. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions."A dramatist for all seasons" Einar Haugen calls Henrik Ibsen in this series of lectures given in honor of the 150th anniversary of the Norwegian playwright's birth. Using a modified version of the communications model developed by linguist Roman Jakobson, Haugen provides a readable, succinct analysis of Ibsen's thinking and dramaturgy. He examines the ways in which Ibsen the author communicated with his nineteenth-century audience and is able, still, to move and inform playgoers today.Haugen brings to this work a lifetime of familiarity with Ibsen in Norwegian and in translation, and he draws upon his own experience as a theatergoer and as an observer of student and audience reaction to the plays. Ibsen's Drama will bring pleasure and a deeper understanding of the playwright to students and playgoers alike.Einar Haugen is Victor S. Thomas Professor of Scandinavian and Linguistics, emeritus, at Harvard University. He is author, editor, or translator of many books and articles in linguistics, literature, and immigrant history, notably The Norwegian Language in America (1953), The Scandinavian Languages (1976), and Land of the Free (1978).

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.