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This article examines the role of art in the work of Swedish author Inger Edelfeldt. Based on an analysis of the short story “Skapelsen” (“The Creation,” 1995), the article argues that Edelfeldt’s literary works present two opposing views of art: art as an imitation of life and art as a source of life, which in turn are aligned with Nietzsche’s distinction between the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Furthermore, the article investigates how this distinction relates to Edelfeldt’s stories of the artist as heroine. The article argues that these stories fall into two major categories: the comic and utopian Künsterlinroman – exemplified by Hustru (Wife, 1978) and Det hemliga namnet (The Secret Name, 1999) – and the tragic and critical Künstlerinroman – exemplified by Konsten att dö (The Art of Dying, 2014). The analysis shows that these novels, while antithetical in tendency and structure, are organized by the same dialectic between the Apollonian and Dionysian and between art as an imitation of life and art as a source of life. While one side offers a naïvely utopian and individualistic picture of the woman artist in contemporary society, the other gives a realistic and critical perspective on the same subject. And the interconnection between the two views of art reveals a deeper complexity in the author’s portrayal of the contemporary woman artist than can be achieved through isolated analyses of her individual works.

Freud's theory of narcissism, developed in the 1910s and 1920s, can be seen as a radical break with the Narcissus tradition in that the myth of Narcissus is turned into a theory about man's psychosexual constitution. This prompts the question of whether, or to what extent, Freud's theory influenced subsequent literary treatments of the theme. This article examines in particular the Narcissus reference in Hermann Hesse's novel Narziß und Goldmund (1930). Hesse had an intimate, but not uncritical, relationship with psychoanalysis, and his novel provides an interesting illustration of how the Narcissus reference was used in the direct aftermath of Freud's conceptualisation. In this article, I argue that while the narrative frame of the Narcissus myth is broken up in the novel, it remains poetically productive. Narcissism is incorporated into the intertextual nexus, but without replacing Narcissus. Three distinct layers of the Narcissus reference are identified in the novel, an Ovidian, a Freudian, and a neo-Platonic, which interrelate in ways that prompt reflection on the relation between individuality and intersubjectivity, and between life and art.

This dissertation is an intertextual-thematological investigation of the Narcissus theme at the turn of the century 1900. It focuses primarily on French-, German-, and English-language decadent and Symbolist literature from the 1890s and early 1900s, as well as on early sexology and psychoanalysis. The general claim of the dissertation is that the common denominator for the turn-of-the-century interest in Narcissus is the sense of a destabilized foundation of selfhood, expounded here as a crisis of the modern self.

The first chapter explores Narcissus as a poetic symbol, primarily within the context of French Symbolism. Young Symbolist writers such as André Gide and Camille Mauclair develop Narcissus as a symbol of pure self-referentality which performs a poetic reconciliation of the contingency of individual and finite existence with an absolute ideality. This chapter further explores the way in which Narcissus was used a polemical figure by opponents of Symbolism, such as Saint-Georges de Bouhélier, and how the symbol was developed to investigate the articulation between contingent and foundational aspects of selfhood by the mature Paul Valéry.

The second chapter focuses on decadent narrative representations of the theme in works by Oscar Wilde, Leopold Andrian and others. These treatments employ the generic contours of a Bildungsroman, but depict the process of Bildung as a failure where the self-knowledge projected as its goal is unattainable. They thereby thematize the inability of the young male subject to find a steady foundation for his sense of selfhood in a modern world marked by irony and disbelief.

The third chapter focuses on the conceptualization of the Narcissus theme as narcissism. It begins by tracing the genesis of the concept particularly in the works of Havelock Ellis, Isidor Sadger, Otto Rank and Sigmund Freud. The investigation then focuses on the role narcissism comes to play in Freud’s theory and argues that it ties selfhood and subjectivity to biological causation, but that it also allows Freud to suggest a path of psychologically informed Bildung, leading to self-knowledge and subjective autonomy.