AbstractsPhilosophy & Theology

My thesis deals with the ethics of early Ibsen, taking for its scope the early plays written by Ibsen between 1850-1857, just before the Christiania Marriage Crisis. My thesis both creatively engages with and finally distances itself from the negative and ambivalent schools of criticism, which I trace to the influences of Brandes and Ricoeur. It advances an ethics of early Ibsen from the positive school, whose influence I trace to Løchen. Following an excursus into the viability of literary ethics in the age of technology, I engage in a dialectical analysis of 'Catiline', 'The Burial Mound', 'Lady Inger', 'Norma', 'Olaf Liljekrans', 'The Feast at Solhaug', and the Marriage Triad, deriving an ethical system therefrom.