Literary Significance and Criticism
Kristin Lavransdatter was notable and to some extent controversial in its time, for its explicit characterization of sex in general and female sexuality in particular; and its treatment of morally ambiguous situations.
It was the main basis for Undset being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Read more about this topic: Kristin Lavransdatter
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“There is no calm philosophy of life here, such as you might put at the end of the Almanac, to hang over the farmer’s hearth,—how men shall live in these winter, in these summer days. No philosophy, properly speaking, of love, or friendship, or religion, or politics, or education, or nature, or spirit; perhaps a nearer approach to a philosophy of kingship, and of the place of the literary man, than of anything else.”
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“The hypothesis I wish to advance is that ... the language of morality is in ... grave disorder.... What we possess, if this is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.”
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