Hans Christian Andersen: The Story of His Life and Work 1805-75 - Softcover

Hans Christian Andersen: The Story of His Life and Work 1805-75.

Anbieter:

Fundus-Online GbR Borkert Schwarz Zerfaß
(Berlin, Deutschland)

Bewertung

Bewertung:

Buchbeschreibung Original softcover. Zustand: Sehr gut. 376 p., plates, ill. From the library of Prof. Wolfgang Haase, long-time editor of ANRW and the International Journal of the Classical Tradition (IJCT). - Overall very good and clean. - Preface: The first time I realized that Hans Christian Andersen was a person who had really lived, and was not just the title of a wonderful book of fairy tales, was when my grandmother, having read me one of Andersen s tales, told me how she had once met him, even danced with him at a party when he was an old man and she a young girl of seventeen. Weren t you proud? I asked her. No, she replied. In fact, I ve never felt so humiliated in all my life. At the time I felt so ashamed when that ugly old man asked me to dance that I could have died on the spot. Moreover, he couldn t dance and kept on treading on my toes with his ridiculously long feet. It ruined the party for me! Later in life she saw the scene in a different light. Over the years Andersen has been seen by different people in many different ways. There were always those who saw him only as the vain egotist that he certainly also was. There have been others who saw him almost as a martyr or, with a phrase used by Georg Brandes, as the hounded animal in Danish literature , a genius ruthlessly persecuted at home and only grudgingly recognized after having been acclaimed by the world. To some extent Andersen himself is responsible for both over-simplifications. Some have seen him as a snob and a toady, others have stressed the element of sympathy for the underdog in his prose writings. There are biographers who have gone to such extremes in eulogizing him that they have even tried to explain away his egocentricity and his vanity. Many are the successful attempts to sentimentalize his life story, serving it to children with a thick layer of sugar-icing as a tear-sodden tale about poor little Hans who succeeded in killing the giants of stupidity and envy, and ended by becoming rich and famous and living happily ever after. The more one knows about Andersen the more one realizes how complex his personality was, and there are few writers who died a hundred years ago about whose life it is possible to know so much. He was obsessed with writing about himself and his own life and left behind a whole series of autobiographies and autobiographical sketches. He was also a prolific letter writer, and thousands of his letters are now available in scholarly editions, many of which have only been published in recent years. It is not only his own letters which have been preserved; he himself rarely destroyed a letter he received, so that in most cases both sides of the correspondence are available. Finally, during much of his lifetime Andersen kept diaries, which are now being published in full for the first time. ISBN 9780374523978 Sprache: Englisch Gewicht in Gramm: 495. Artikel-Nr. 1183121

Weitere Informationen zu diesem Verkäufer | Verkäufer kontaktieren