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Shadows on the Grass, Winter's Tales, Last Tales, Anecdotes of Destiny, and Ehrengard, Brantly explores the clues, details, and subplots in texts that critics often describe as puzzles and labyrinths. Brantly reveals the thought and care that Dinesen devoted to the construction of her stories, her expansive knowledge of world literature, and the great pleasure awaiting readers as they unravel the mysteries embedded in her texts."--BOOK JACKET.
This book investigates the writings of Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen) from an existentialist angle. Although it has not been subject to much study, Blixen’s writing elegantly and subtly integrates the ideas of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Sartre in a way that makes the philosophers more accessible to a wider audience. However, Blixen also offers her own ideas of the fundamental problem in existentialism: how to arrive at an authentic identity through free, individual choices – or, as Nietzsche put it: how to become who you are. On the whole, Blixen’s authorship can be seen as an existential study of the 20th century and the ways by which Western culture came to be what it is now. In agreement with Nietzsche’s statement that all philosophy is an involuntary autobiography, this book also contains accounts of the lives of the three philosophers chiefly involved in this study.
This new study addresses the provocative essays of Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen), an iconic figure in Scandinavia and the Anglo-American world. Celebrated for her literary tales, Karen Blixen’s essays offer sagacious reflections on three significant challenges of the twentieth century: feminism, Nazism, and colonialism. Karen Blixen (1885–1962) contributed to topical debates in Denmark, particularly during the 1950s when her distinct voice on Danish radio became familiar to a nation of listeners. Some of her lectures, radio addresses, and newspaper chronicles were later published as essays and now constitute a distinct genre within her work. In this study, Blixen’s most important essays ...
Narrative practice has come under attack in the current "post-truth" era. In fact, many associate "narrative hermeneutics"--the field of inquiry concerned with reflection on the meaning and interpretation of stories--directly with this putative movement beyond truth. Challenging this view, The Use and Abuse of Stories argues that this broad arena of inquiry instead serves as a vitally important vehicle for addressing and redressing the social and political problems at hand. Hanna Meretoja and Mark Freeman have gathered an interdisciplinary group of esteemed authors to explore how interpretation is relevant to current discussions in narrative studies and to the broader debate that revolves ar...
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Although Isak Dinesen has been widely acclaimed as a popular writer, her work has received little sustained critical attention. In this revisionist study, Susan Hardy Aiken takes up the complex relations of gender, sexuality, and representation in Dinesen's narratives. Drawing on feminist, psychoanalytic, and post-structuralist theories, Aiken shows how the form and meaning of Dinesen's texts are affected by her doubled situations as a Dane who wrote in English, a European who lived for many years in Africa, and a woman who wrote under a male pseudonym within a male-centered literary tradition. In a series of readings that range across Dinesen's career, Aiken demonstrates that Dinesen persis...
Beryl Markham, like Karen Blixen, could only have come out of Africa. Pioneering aviatrix, flamboyant beauty, brilliant race-horse trainer, unscrupulous seducer - her life story is for every reader who was enthralled by Blixen's exotic world, that of Kenya between the wars. This fully authorised biography, drawn from the author's personal association with Beryl and her family, paints a vivid portrait of a tempestuous and controversial character. It tells of her friendship with Karen Blixen (though she commandeered Blixen's husband Bror and lover Denys Finch Hatton), of her spectacular courage when she became the first person to fly from England to America, and of the mysteries surrounding her highly praised, bestselling book WEST WITH THE NIGHT.
Karen Blixen's works are explored in the light of a passionate insistence on living out this double nature of the divine and the demonic. The "aristocratic" is examined as her depiction of a conduct of life that is faithful to destiny: The aristocratic viewpoint is in tune with eternity and places no obstructive morality between self and life. Vitality has its source in direct access to the ocean of inexhaustible opportunities with which life presents us. The "world" in her novel Out of Africa, for example, plays a key role as the consummate illustration of an aristocratic culture. The aesthetic guidelines for literary form (as well as art) as advocated by Karen Blixen are discussed, and her...
"Conservationist, scholar, soldier, white hunter and fabled lover - Denys Finch Hatton was an aristocrat of leonine nonchalance. After a dazzling career at Eton and Oxford he sailed in 1910 for British East Africa - still then the land of the pioneer. There, concluded his obituary in The Times, 'No one who ever met him, whether man or woman, old or young, white or black, failed to come under his spell ... He was different from everyone else. He always left an impression of greatness - there is no other word - and aroused interest as no one else could.'" "Too Close to the Sun is a story of big guns and small planes, princes from England and sultans from Zanzibar, a famous divorce case, a Wels...