This collection of essays by eminent Scandinavists focusses on works and artistic movements prominent towards the ends of the last four centuries. The last decade of each century has seen amazing innovations in Scandinavian arts, especially in literature: the flowering of genres in national languages in the 1600s, the bawdy rococo voice of Carl Michael Bellman in the 1700s, the rise of Scandinavian drama with August Strindberg and Henrik Ibsen and the neoromanticism of the premodernistic novels of Hamsun. Each essay is a study from the unique perspective of one of the field's foremost European or American scholars and is inspired by the Renaissance interests of the Norwegian scholar Harlad S. Naess. The collection as a whole contributes to the creation of a modern, multilayered view of the beginnings and endings of the seventeenth-, eighteenth-, nineteenth- and twentieth-century worlds in Scandinavia and Scandinavian America.