A picture of the book Andersen and the World

Andersen and the World

The book Andersen and the World is published online here. It contains papers from the first Hans Christian Andersen conference ever. See more details about the book on the title page.

Hans Christian Andersen is primarily known as an author of fairy tales and is therefore, especially outside of Denmark, conventionally regarded as a writer of children's literature. This is probably the reason why his oeuvre has never been an obvious topic at universities outside of Denmark.

The Hans Christian Andersen Center (University of Southern Denmark. "Odense University" at that time), that was founded in 1988, wanted to change this situation and decided to initiate a series of international Hans Christian Andersen conferences.

And thus in august 1991 well over 70 scholars from 16 countries met in Odense to hear research papers and to discuss Hans Christian Andersen. The shared basis was to view Hans Christian Andersen's oeuvre from from the point of view of adult literature.

Andersen and the World contains, besides 9 reports about research in the field of Hans Christian Andersen studies in 1991 in a range of the represented countries 40 papers by 47 authors divided in six categories (see the table of contents). There is, of course, a preface, resumes in English of Danish and Swedish papers and a funny (but only in Danish) farewell song written by DPhil Niels Kofoed.