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"Our time is the time of the fairy tale": Hans Christian Andersen between Traditional Craft and Literary Modernism
- Marvels & Tales
- Wayne State University Press
- Volume 20, Number 2, 2006
- pp. 166-178
- 10.1353/mat.2007.0014
- Article
- Additional Information
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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 developed 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.