“A peculiar day in the annals” : the collision of modernity and aristocracy in Hjalmar Bergman’s The Markurells of Wadköping

Hjalmar Bergman’s formally innovative 1919 novel The Markurells of Wadköping deals with the clash between the traditional aristocratic dispensation and the socially disruptive forces of modernity. These opposed orders are embodied in two characters, Carl-Magnus de Lorche and Herr Markurell, whose connections and conflicts come to represent the destiny of society as a whole as it attempts to cope with the emergence of the new.