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The position held by Hans Christian Andersen in world literature is that of a children's author. In Scandinavia, and to some extent also in Germany, France, and Eastern Europe, there is an awareness that Andersen was much more than that: a poet, first of all, known to some extent as an author of novels, travelogues, and poems, but still unknown as the prolific writer of stage plays, which he was throughout his professional life.
In general, Andersen's fame is based on ten or twelve stories conceived of as fairy tales and, to his misfortune, often mixed up with stories by the Brothers Grimm. Fen or twelve stories, however, is an astonishing number, given the fact that Andersen was a citizen of a small country, and also considering the number of widely known texts by other so-called immortal poets.
The general view of Andersen as "only" a children's author, together with the exclusive labeling of his texts as "fairy tales," which they are and are not, has led to the common conclusion that he was and is in terms of "real" literature an outdated phenomenon of nineteenth-century Romanticism or Biedermeier. Already, the famous Danish critic Georg Brandes, in an article on Andersen as a fairy-tale writer (1869),1 besides offering all due admiration, labeled Andersen as a person of childish nature who wrote in a childish genre and belonged to a childish period in literature-namely, Romanticism. Unwilling as he was, Brandes recognized no trace of modernity in Andersen.
Let us therefore examine a few main issues concerning Andersen's position both in the history of literature and in the literary heritage of today. These issues might be:
To what extent is it justified to label Andersen as a children's author?
Are his so-called fairy tales really fairy tales or something else?
What was Andersen's position in the development of nineteenth-century literature?
What was his personal position in the context of his time?
First, let us consider the question of Andersen's being an author of children's literature. We have to face the fact that Andersen never really intended to make a literary career as a children's author. When he published his first small volumes of fairy tales in 1835, since 1829 he had already established his name in Danish...