These latter three owe quite a lot of their prominence to Georg Brandes, a Danish critic who, in 1883, in his book of that title, identified Men of the Modern Breakthrough.50 The ‘modern minds’ that he highlighted included Flaubert, John Stuart Mill, Zola, Tolstoy, Bret Harte and Walt Whitman, but above all Ibsen, Strindberg and Nietzsche. Brandes defined the task of modern literature as the synthesis of naturalism and romanticism–of the outer and inner–and cited these three men as supreme examples.
