ABSTRACT
Johannes Ewald was a Danish dramatist and poet, the son of a Lutheran pietist minister, who became a writer following a short-lived military career and period spent studying theology. Writing as a Danish sentimentalist, his style was influenced by European writers, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Lawrence Sterne and Edward Young. The excerpt below is taken from his ‘Life and Opinions’, a stylised autobiography, one of his few pieces of prose writings. The work was unfinished and published after his death. Written in the first person, it is a compelling narrative account of his life, and reflects both a tradition in Protestant self-writing, and their fictional counterparts in the novel. Ewald’s influences are particularly evident in this excerpt, which both follows Rousseau’s account of love in childhood (see source 4), and which references characters in Samuel Richardson, Lawrence Sterne and classical literature. As a source for the history of emotions, it provides a compelling account of the highs and lows of youthful love. That he recounts his life through fictional motifs offers an interesting example of how people use popular literature to make sense of feelings and events that are otherwise intensely personal. His artistry, wordplay, and engagement with his audience destabilise any sense that this is a private text, asking us to reflect on the authenticity of his text and why a description of feeling plays such a critical role in the production of the eighteenth-century self for the reader.
