This article examines two of the most canonical plays in all of Scandinavian and European modern drama – Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler (1890) and August Strindberg’s A Dream Play (1902) – through the prism of the history of knowledge. The primary claim of the article is that these two plays are paradigmatic literary representations and critiques of one of the main historical processes pertaining to academic knowledge in modernity: specialization. While specialization is an oft-studied process, sociologically and historically, it remains relatively unexplored in literary scholarship and theatre studies. More specifically, representations of specialization have not received sufficient scholarly attention, in spite of the sustained relevance of the topic. In the article, I therefore outline, with the examples of Ibsen and Strindberg, how specialization can be understood not only as a facet of the history of knowledge proper but also in the context of literary history and the history of drama.
Andreas Tranvik (Tue,) studied this question.