Creating an Alternative to Naturalism: Ola Hansson's Assimilation of Nietzche

Summary In a series of articles published in Germany between 1889 and 1892, Ola Hansson attempted to create a theoretical basis for an alternative to naturalism. Hansson's reading of Nietzsche provided his chief source of inspiration. Although, for a short time, Ola Hansson and Hermann Bahr lead the revolt against naturalism from beneath the same banner, Hansson eventually came to reject Bahr's Seelenstände as a naturalism of the nerves. Through invoking Nietzsche's critique of realistic artists, Hansson sought to reveal the dishonesty inherent in the naturalist pretention of depicting unmediated reality. Instead, Hansson recommends the honesty of self‐conscious subjectivity and a departure from the restrictions of plausibility. Hansson petitions for an admission of the imaginative and the symbolic into literature. Both Hugo von Hofmannsthal and August Strindberg seem to have benefitted directly from Hansson's recommendations.