AbstractTom Kristensen’s travel book En Kavaler i Spanien (1926) was the result of a stay at the Danish explorer Knud Rasmussen’s house, where Kristensen not only met his physical and psychological superior, he also began his artistic development and personal breakdown towards the novel Hærværk (1930). The article argues that with a departure from this context, En Kavaler i Spanien can be read as an original and complex subgenre of the sentimental novel and it suggests that the work might best be categorized as ‘hard sentimentalism’. This subgenre of the travel novel can be identified in the intertwinement of the core thematic of the book — eroticism, medieval Spain and identity loss — with style and form. The paradoxical generic notion of ‘hard sentimentalism’ is used to connect medieval Spain with the erotic, but in an increasingly dangerous way, which threatens the traveler’s identity by increasing homosexual attraction and opening an abyss of degeneration and distorted emptiness behind the flirt.
Hård sentimentalisme og seksualiseret middelalder i Tom Kristensens En Kavaler i Spanien