This is a book about Strindberg and about autobiographical writing, about how a particular writer projects himself in language, the problems this entails, the subterfuges it engenders, about how he finds and loses himself there. It therefore attempts to place this central aspect of Strindberg’s project upon a more nuanced and substantial footing than the familiar tradition of biographical criticism in Strindberg studies normally permits, and does not restrict itself only to those works singled out by Strindberg as explicitly autobiographical. Nor, I should perhaps add, does it concern itself in any detailed way with the laborious examination of the relative accuracy of the life Strindberg attributed to himself – whether, for example, the description of his early years in The Son of a Servant as a time of fear and hunger is in fact belied by the evident plenitude in the way of food and drink as chronicled in his father’s household accounts. In any case, the myth a writer generates about his own experience is as significant a fact as any other, and a writer like Strindberg merely accentuates the way in which all of us live our lives as fictions in terms of the available narrative and plot structures, structures that incorporate those personal symbolic landscapes which (as Strindberg well knew) are in large part unconsciously fostered by the prevailing doxa or mythologies. I am aware, however, that the approach employed here remains partial. Notwithstanding his achievement in other fields, all of which, including his scientific preoccupations deserve to be taken seriously, Strindberg’s major achievement remains his drama. A consummate creator as well as player of roles, the mosaic work of character which he elaborated in his theatrical projections is an essential complement to the life traced in his prose works, and deserves to be studied as such. Moreover, like Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, in her analysis of Strindberg in Pour une psychanalyse de l’art et de la créativité (Paris, 1971), “Je n’ai pas manqué toutefois d’être frappée par la pauvreté relative des thèmes des oeuvres biographiques si on les compare à la richesse des élaborations dont ces mêmes thèmes sont l’objet dans l’oeuvre dramatique.” Maybe the occasion to explore this elaborated wealth of drama will one day present itself.

The author looks at the life of the playwright best known for the work Miss Julie, paying special attention to how real life inspired the ideas, premises and characters of his plays and other literary works.

"Legends: Autobiographical Sketches" by August Strindberg. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.

Photography has transformed the way we picture ourselves. Although photographs seem to "prove" our existence at a given point in time, they also demonstrate the impossibility of framing our multiple and fragmented selves. As Linda Haverty Rugg convincingly shows, photography's double take on self-image mirrors the concerns of autobiographers, who see the self as simultaneously divided (in observing/being) and unified by the autobiographical act. Rugg tracks photography's impact on the formation of self-image through the study of four literary autobiographers concerned with the transformative power of photography. Obsessed with self-image, Mark Twain and August Strindberg both attempted (unsuccessfully) to integrate photographs into their autobiographies. While Twain encouraged photographers, he was wary of fakery and kept a fierce watch on the distribution of his photographic image. Strindberg, believing that photographs had occult power, preferred to photograph himself. Because of their experiences under National Socialism, Walter Benjamin and Christa Wolf feared the dangerously objectifying power of photographs and omitted them from their autobiographical writings. Yet Benjamin used them in his photographic conception of history, which had its testing ground in his often-ignored Berliner Kindheit um 1900. And Christa Wolf's narrator in Patterns of Childhood attempts to reclaim her childhood from the Nazis by reconstructing mental images of lost family photographs. Confronted with multiple and conflicting images of themselves, all four of these writers are torn between the knowledge that texts, photographs, and indeed selves are haunted by undecidability and the desire for the returned glance of a single self.

The recent sesquicentennial of August Strindberg's (1849-1912) birth was an appropriate occasion for investigating the role of this towering figure in Nordic literature. By Eugene O'Neill once labeled the most modern of moderns, Strindberg the playwright has commanded a prophetic influence on 20th century drama and theater, and his voluminous production in several other genres continues to constitute a watershed and some of the highpoints in Swedish letters. Yet, Strindberg remains as controversial today as he was in his lifetime. The nature and degree of his modernity are still under discussion, and so is the impact of his remarkable genre-proliferation and border-transgressing Swedishness. Once considered too unruly for the pillars of society and too pious for the radicals, his artistic and existential points of gravity remain in critical dispute. Generally subjected to traditional modes of inquiry, Strindberg's complexity calls for new critical approaches. Strindberg and the Other brings together scholars, younger and older, from Scandinavia and abroad, who either venture such new approaches or engage their practitioners in fruitful dialogue. Especially promising among the volume's methodological and theoretical propositions is the notion of the 'other' and 'otherness.' Indeed, the image of August Strindberg himself is quite an-other at this millennium than it was just half a century ago.

One of the greatest classics of modern theater concerns a willful young aristocrat's seduction of her father's valet during a Midsummer's Eve celebration. Complete with Strindberg's highly-regarded critical preface.