Fictionality Fighting Superstition—Early Danish Novelists’ Engagement with Science

This article investigates the role of early Danish fiction in negotiating the epistemological shift from superstition to scientific rationality during the Enlightenment. Focusing primarily on Ludvig Holberg’s Niels Klim (1741) and Erik Pontoppidan’s Menoza (1742–43), it argues that eighteenth-century Danish novelists mobilized fictionality as a rhetorical strategy to promote science and contest irrational belief. Drawing on rhetorical fictionality theory, the analysis elucidates how novelists explicitly signaled their narratives as fictions to distinguish them from erroneous nonfictional discourses and narratives that provoked superstitious beliefs. Holberg’s satirical engagement exposes the fallacies of pseudo-science and the belief in false truth claims, whereas Pontoppidan integrates faith and reason by articulating a theologically grounded yet scientifically informed defense of Christianity. Subsequent Danish fiction from the period extends this critical project, employing parody and satire to denounce superstition and advocate science. The article thus demonstrates that, far from opposing scientific discourse, early Danish fiction functioned as an epistemic ally of Enlightenment rationality, actively participating in the cultural formation of modern concepts of knowledge and science.