Danish Orientalism

Abstract

Orientalism became an important current in nineteenth-century Danish culture, but although it was contemporaneous with the orientalism of the leading European nations – Great Britain, France, Germany – it differed from these orientalisms in that the Danes, who were not in the same way involved in the project of colonizing the East, were less hostile, looking for similarities with the Orient rather than for differences. The article gives an account of this development of orientalism in nineteenth-century Denmark – from elite culture to popular culture and from literature and music to architecture and painting – and it argues that Danish orientalism may be interpreted as an expression of what was new and strange about the experience of modernity.