Contents of
Vol. 20, No. 2 (2006)

Contents

Editorial Policy

Guidelines for Submissions

From the Editors

Preface to the Special Issue “‘Hidden, but not Forgotten’: Hans Christian Andersen’s Legacy in the Twentieth Century”

Andrea Immel

ARTICLES

On Translating H. C. Andersen

Diana Crone Frank and Jeffrey Frank

Hans Christian Andersen lived to see his tales translated into dozens of languages, and often he knew that the results were deplorable. Some translators “improved” Andersen’s prose, and other didn’t know Danish well enough to translate it correctly. Long before Disney, a sad ending was made happy; a moral might be added and sometimes Victorian sensibilities demanded a bit of bowdlerizing. It is a wonder that the stories survived all this. Even for a skilled and serious translator, Andersen is tricky. This essay examines the challenges of getting this trickiest of writers into English.

“Our time is the time of the fairy tale”: Hans Christian Andersen between Traditional Craft and Literary Modernism

Johan de Mylius

This article asks whether and to what extent Hans Christian Andersen was a children’s author, whether his so-called fairy tales really were fairy tales, and how he should be regarded in the context of his time and of the nineteenth century as a whole. From the very beginning Andersen understood himself as a ”poet,” and the so-called childish tone of his fairy tales is mostly a mask, behind which a poet of high ambitions hides. Throughout his career he develops his style and genre in an ongoing quest for a hitherto unseen kind of poetry. Thus he is a forerunner of much later experiments in the history of literature.

A Liberating Imagination: Andersen in England

Julia Briggs

It was Hans Christian Andersen who reintroduced the English to fantasy and folklore, and in particular his own ironic versions of both. Although early translators sifted out much of his linguistic comedy and vitality, the stories and their structures persisted with all their original force and altered the character of writing for children in English. Children’s writers from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries borrowed ideas and even tones of voice from Andersen. This article offers specific examples of Andersen’s impact on children’s writing, in what is often thought of as a peculiarly “English” tradition.

The Ugly Duckling’s Legacy: Adulteration, Contemporary Fantasy, and the Dark

Naomi Wood

This essay surveys recent retellings by fantasy writers for children and adults of Hans Christian Andersen's stories. Tales that have inspired multiple versions include "The Snow Queen," "The Little Match Girl," and "The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf.” Although the "darkness" of Hans Christian Andersen is often said to be inappropriate for children, this essay investigates the extent to which this is true in writers' commentary on the tales as well as how they reframe "dark" issues in their own work. Contemporary writers continue to explore Andersen's Romantic themes of individuals' struggle to survive and create art despite catastrophe and the indifference of Nature and society to personal pleasure.

H. C. Andersen as Seen by Critics of German Children's Literature since the Beginning of the Twentieth Century

Hans-Heino Ewers

This article examines how twentieth-century critics, especially in Germany, grappled with the question of Hans Christian Andersen’s appropriateness for children. In debating this question, critics point to the nature of the fantastic and personification in Andersen’s stories and their relationship to social reality and allegory; Andersen’s irony and the “intellectual” content of his tales; the melancholy and pessimism pervading many tales; and the place of his stories between children’s literature and adult literature, and between the Romantic and the modern. Ultimately, the paper also gestures toward the “generic diversity” of Andersen’s works, the mistaken homogeneity of his oeuvre, and the fact that he is not only a forerunner of writers like Kafka but the creator of works based on a poetics of a modern children’s literature that is both parabolic and symbolic.

Critical Reflections about Hans Christian Andersen, the Failed Revolutionary

Jack Zipes

What made Hans Christian Andersen so popular in his day was not his revolutionary tales but his bitter irony and compromising ideology. His quest to establish genuine art and unusual art as an independent artist was hampered almost from the beginning by his fear to be independent. Ironically, it is this troubled state of mind, recorded in some of his more daring tales, that may constitute his appeal as a modernist writer, or to be more precise, the failed revolutionary.

From Andersen On: Fairy Tales Tell Our Lives

Jane Yolen

Jane Yolen’s essay offers a very personal look into her own experience as a writer of fairy tales. Here she explores Hans Christian Andersen's autobiographical writings, Oscar Wilde's political and aesthetic works, and her own approach to writing.

Migratory Birds: Illustrating Andersen’s Nightingale

Mikhail Magaril

An artist living in New York City, Mikhail Magaril, describes the experience of working on his project The Nightingale by Hans Christian Andersen. The artist discusses his inspiration for the book and recalls childhood memories that aided him in the completion of the project throughout his travels in Russia and Denmark—Andersen’s birthplace. Beyond explaining the materials that were needed to create the book, as well as his decisions to use certain materials instead of others, Magaril demonstrates his devotion to Andersen

Reviews

Critical Exchanges

Comments on Fairy Tales and Oral Tradition

Lewis C. Seifert

Catherine Velay-Vallantin

Reply

Ruth B. Bottigheimer

Contributors