Kierkegaard, Literature, and the Arts

Kierkegaard, Literature, and the Arts is a collection of fourteen essays that illuminate the broad and often underappreciated variety of the nineteenth-century Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard’s engagements with literature and the arts.

These essays, contextualized with an insightful introduction by Eric Ziolkowski, explore Kierkegaard’s relationship to literature (poetry, prose, and storytelling), the performing arts (theater, music, opera, and dance), and the visual arts and film. The collection is rounded out with a final comparative section that considers Kierkegaard in juxtaposition with a romantic poet (William Blake), a modern composer (Arnold Schoenberg), and a contemporary singer-songwriter (Bob Dylan).

Kierkegaard was as much an aesthetic thinker as a philosopher, and his philosophical writings are complemented by his literary and music criticism. Bringing together insights from an international group of Kierkegaard scholars, Kierkegaard, Literature, and the Arts will offer much of interest to scholars concerned with Kierkegaard as well as teachers, performers, and readers in the various aesthetic fields discussed. 

Eric Ziolkowski is H. P. Manson Professor of Bible and head of the Department of of Religious Studies at Lafeyette College in Easton, Pennsylvania.