The Wait For The Land: Study On Innovations Of Hamsun's Novels

Knut Hamsun is a famous writer from Norway in the 20th century, and the winner of The Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920.His novels show strong soil awareness. He insisted focusing countryside life when industry and city culture are growing fast. He revealed the close relationship between human and nature, and the co-existence of the soil and human. Hamsun's idea has no novelty while the Ecological Literature is developing vigorously today. But in the era of his life, Hamsun's view was a great innovation.The thesis discusses Hamsun's writing from soil awareness, psychological description and tragic love story, pointed Hamsun's difference from other European writers who lived in the early twentieth century and explain his distinct contribution to the history of the early 20th century European literature.The full-length novel Growth of the Soil, which won the Nobel Prize, is a concentration of Hamsun's soil awareness. The novel characterized a farmer named Issac, who came to wasteland in the north Norway, he cultivated all the year, then build his rich farm and led a happy life. He is just like a hero. The root of the unique theme of the novel is Hamsun's unique experience: he was born in poor family, lack money to go to school. He was wandering and work everywhere as a teenager. So he had special keen on soil and grain. Moreover, the creation location of the novel is Norway, a country with terrible weather and value agriculture. Norwegian farmers have never suffered from oppression. Rural literature developed very early there.To analyze Growth of the Soil with Ecocriticism, the work expressed Hamsuns's views as bellows:firstly, Ecological Holism, secondly, condemnation of urban society and contempt on those who betrayed the land, thirdly, respect to agriculture and farmers, fourthly, love for the Norway rural life, fifthly, the importance of women to the soil, sixthly, the proposition of machine serving agriculture and opposition of machine destroying farms.Hamsun used writing techniques of Stream of Consciousness, like Internal monolog, Free Association and Montage. If compared with Lev Tolstoy or FyodorDostoyevsky, Hamsun's works such as Hunger, Mysteries have absurd and non-logic Psychological description, which reveal people's madness when away from land.Hamsun shaped many sad men and women in his novels. Their lives ended with death and destruction of love. We can conclude Hamsun's soil awareness from the narrative mode of the love stories. When the love leaves the soil, it will go to death. In those love stories, there're some metaphors such as"shoot"and"city hotel"to show Hamsun's view. Shoot means destroying the nature, so those men who shot in the forest can not get love and must be killed by bullet."city hotel"symbolize the whole city which is abnormal and evil. Hamsun Infiltrate his soil awareness in his love stories.