Hunger

Description

Hunger is the first-person story of a young man desperately trying to establish himself in the city as a writer, living in shabby lodgings where he can seldom afford to pay the rent, eating almost nothing, and engaging spasmodically and manically with landladies, eccentric elderly men, policemen, shopkeepers, pawnbrokers, and others on the way.

• Provides a new perspective on the novel in the light of Hamsun's 'poetry of the nerves' by discussing not only the affective life of the narrator in this perspective but also the urban context which embodies his 'extended mind'
• The translation reflects new changes in scholarship and provides a fresh and sharp-edged sense of the narrative voice
• Pays specific attention to the relation between the segments of text that were published earlier and the novel as it appeared in 1890

About the Author(s)

Tore Rem and Terence Cave

Tore Rem is Professor of Literatures in English at the University of Oslo and Director of the interdisciplinary initiative UiO:Democracy. He is an academic and a non-fiction writer and has published widely on Scandinavian and British literature. His Knut Hamsun: Reisen til Hitler ('The Journey to Hitler') came out in Norwegian in 2014 and has been translated into several languages. He is general editor of the Penguin Classics edition of Henrik Ibsen, and has, together with Narve Fulsås, published the monograph Ibsen, Scandinavia and the Making of a World Drama (2018) and edited Ibsen in Context (2021).

Terence Cave CBE FBA is Emeritus Professor of French Literature at the University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow of St John's College, Oxford. Known primarily for his contributions to French Renaissance studies (The Cornucopian Text, 1979; Pré-histoires I and II, 1999 and 2001), he has also written on Aristotelian poetics (Recognitions, 1988) and on the relations between literature and music (Mignon's Afterlives, 2011). In 2009, he won the Balzan Prize for literature since 1500; he subsequently directed the Balzan project 'Literature as an object of knowledge', which explored cognitive approaches to literature. His books Thinking with Literature (2016), Reading Beyond the Code (jointly edited with Deirdre Wilson; 2018), and Live Artefacts (2022) are among the outcomes of this project. He has also translated Mme de Lafayette's The Princesse de Clèves for Oxford World's Classics.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Note on the Translation
Select Bibliography
A Chronology of Knut Hamsun
Hunger
Explanatory Notes