“The Shadow Who Wished to Become a Man”:

Doctor Glas in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

This essay considers two recent re-visions of Hjalmar Söderberg’s Doctor Glas (1905), demonstrating how the novels, rather than offering a critique of their pre-text (as is customary in re-vision) facilitate a recuperation of elements of the original narrative, which have been obscured by earlier readings. Finally, it explores how these texts, by questioning the narrative authority of Söderberg’s protagonist, raise issues concerning the primacy of scientific discourses in the twenty-first century