This article considers the British reception of Ibsen around the turn of the century, replacing modernism’s strongly teleological sense of its own temporality with a more spatially inflected account of artistic production that draws on tropes such as ‘the Republic of Letters’, ‘Weltliteratur’ or recent interest in ‘Global Ibsen’. In particular, it examines the independent theatre movement as an exemplary instance of a transnational space operating outside of national canons and histories, and...