Thursday, November 02, 2000
The sorrows of a great Dane
THE LIFE OF Hans Christian Andersen, told with thoroughness and sympathy in this new biography, was as peculiar, fascinating and painful as any of his celebrated fairy tales. This big-boned, gawky, lanky egotist was the ugly duckling, meeting snobbery and ridicule, particularly in his stuffy homeland, for several years before Denmark caught up with its most famous son’s internationalrenown.
Review of Wullschlager's bio of Andersen.
booksonline
posted by Marco Graziosi 5:24 AM
Sunday, October 29, 2000
More than just make believe
Review of Jackie Wullschlager, HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN: The Life of a Storyteller.
Wullschlager is right to give Andersen the credit for being the first person to choose the fairy story as a literary form and then invent new ones, thereby paving the way for Lewis Carroll and the British "golden age" of Victorian and Edwardian fantasy literature for children, not to mention many European books of the same sort. The Grimms, working at the same period, collected and wrote up fairy tales, changing them massively in the process, but unlike Andersen they never dared to invent from scratch.
The Sunday Times
posted by Marco Graziosi 1:56 PM
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