European Languages and Societies Commons^™

The Jutland Heath As A Literary Place Of Inheritance: Hans Christian Andersen, St. St. Blicher, And Jeppe Aakjær, Johs. Nørregaard Frandsen

The Bridge

The Jutland heath was, in a certain sense, created by Danish writers. It was writers such as Steen Steensen Blicher, Meir Goldschmidt, hans Christian Andersen, Jeppe Aakjær, and Johannes V. Jensen who, in their literary depictions, gave the heath a voice, image, and form that made it accessible as a place of experience for their own and future ages. In doing so, they created a place of inheritance—a dynamic, living place of experience that we can possess forever and refer to as part of our cultural inheritance. Today, the heather-clad heath of Jutland exists only in small clumps that have …

Selected Poems By Emil Aarestrup

The Bridge

The name of the Danish physician and poet Emil Aarestrup is associated with sensual, erotic poetry in which a sharp, anatomical eye for the beauty of the human body is joined with a profound narrative about love in a single embrace. In Aarestrup’s works the body comes alive. His erotic gaze is ever-present as a layer of desire in his work, just as his sense of the all-inclusive joy of the embrace conceptualizes pleasure of an explosive and outrageous kind. This was incompatible with the puritanical petit-bourgeois self-restraint and human isolation of the period in which he wrote. This celebration …

The Spirit Of Hans Christian Andersen In The United States, Taru Rauha Spiegel, Kristi Planck Johnson

The Bridge

Hans Christian Andersen (1805-75) was a great traveler and would undoubtedly have liked to visit the United States, in which he took a keen interest. As his fame grew, he received numerous invitations from his admirers across the Atlantic. However, as is well known, he became morbidly afraid of sea voyages after his dear friend, Henriette Wulff, perished in a fire onboard ship in 1858. 1 Prone to seasickness and careful of his health and well being, the aging author found the prospect of the long Atlantic voyage daunting and never undertook it.

At Home In An Astonishing World: The Square Stories Of Louis Jensen, Lise Kildegaard

The Bridge

Louis Jensen, the Danish author of more than 70 books, has published poetry, memoir, and fiction for adult readers, but he is best known for his children and young adult books. He has won numerous literary prizes and honors, including the Nordic Children's Prize (1996), the Hans Christian Andersen Stipend (1998) and the Gyldendals Store Bernebogspris (Gyldendal's Big Children's Book Prize) (2009). He has been nominated several times for both of the most prestigious international awards in children's literature, the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Prize, and the Hans Christian Andersen Award. In 2010, he made the short list (five authors, chosen …

Boganis In America: The American Adventures Of Karen Blixen's Father, Wilhelm Dinesen

The Bridge

Sick at heart and world-weary at the age of twenty-seven, Captain Wilhelm Dinesen (1845-95) turned his back on Europe and set sail for America. The year was 1872. Danish immigration was on the rise, and many immigrants dreamed of making their fortune in the land of opportunity. Dinesen had other reasons. His fortune was already secure, for he had been born to wealth and privilege. As a young man, however, he had gone to war, but war had led to defeat, and defeat to bloody civil war. How could he forget the horrors he had seen and experienced? What he …

Piet Hein ( 1905-1996): A Renaissance Man, Inger M. Olsen

The Bridge

A man who in the year 2000 had had his collections of poems and Crooks published in 1,700,000 copies, who had invented lamp shades, a sundial, and the super ellipse as well as games, who had received the Dansk Design Center's annual prize in 1989 should be easy to locate among people whose biography have been written. Those were my thoughts when I started researching this paper, and great was my surprise when I found that was not at all the case.

Three Short Stories By Carl Hansen, J. R. Christianson

The Bridge

Translator's Note. The Danish-American author, Carl Hansen, was born in Jonstrup near Holbcek in 1860, emigrated to America in 1885, taught for a number of years at Danebod Folk School in Tyler, Minnesota, and died in Seattle in 1916. Enok Mortensen once described him as follows:

"[He] had attended university classes in Denmark and studied at the state agricultural school. He knew something about pharmacology, a lot about veterinary medicine, and much about literature and philosophy ... He was a popular teacher. Each Saturday he gave a lecture-often on classics of Danish literature, and the students sat spellbound as he …

Enok Mortensen And The Immigrant Experience: A View From The Lower Class, Rudolf Jensen

The Bridge

To begin with, I would like to cite several short quotations from Enok Mortensen's fiction to show his primary themes as well as his writing style.

...for jer Emigranter er der aldrig noget, der er saa godt som det var i Danmark...altid skal I sammenligne...1 [for you immigrants there is never anything as good as it was in Denmark...you always have to compare.]

...herover gik man med en underlig Uro i Sindet altid...bare et hundrede Dollars mere, eller Tusinde...eller Millionen...2 [over here in America you are always restless...only a hundred dollars more, or a thousand, or a million.]

...I det …

The Reception Of Danish Science Fiction In The United States, Kristine J. Anderson

The Bridge

Science fiction is a distinctly American genre. Although scholars have traced its origins back as far as the Latin writer Lucian of Samosata,1 it was Hugo Gernsback, a publisher of pulp magazines in the United States, who first gave the genre its name in the June 1929 issue of Wonder Stories. Gernsback had been serializing the scientific romances of such writers as Jules Verne and HG. Wells, emphasizing their treatment of technology and putting them forth as models for other budding writers to imitate. The magazines that Gernsback initiated became very popular, spawning more from other publishers. Groups of aficionados …

Karin Michaelis: Famous Danish Novelist And Humanitarian Rebel With A Cause, Merete Von Eyben

The Bridge

Consider the following question: Which Danish author was not only one of the most famous European authors in the early part of the twentieth century, but also one of the most widely read female ones; had all of her books translated into German and some of them into as many as 30 other languages; wrote the most notorious bestseller of that period; celebrated her 60th birthday at a banquet hosted by Austrian PEN in Vienna where she was awarded both an Austrian and a Czechoslovakian medal and honored by the German language papers as Europe's Conscience; had her books banned …

Quest And Place In Carl Hansen And Hans Christian Andersen, David S. Iversen

The Bridge

Carl Hansen and Hans Christian Andersen demonstrate a number of similar characteristics as authors. Both wrote their stories with their respective readership in mind. Both authors strove to establish character and setting with as few words as possible. Both knew their audiences well and made use of scenes, places, and experiences that their readers recognized. Each man was also driven to become an author, albeit for slightly different reasons. Hans Christian Andersen was, according to Sven H. Rossel, "single-minded in pursuit of art and recognition,"1 while Carl Hansen relates that "some five years before he emigrated to the United States …

The Travels Abroad Of H. C. Andersen, Don Mowatt

The Bridge

A complete appreciation of Hans Christian Andersen has always been limited to Danish-speaking readers because so much of his private life is most clearly revealed in his letters, diaries, and travel books which remain largely untranslated into English. There is a handful of exceptions, the majority of which are mid-nineteenth century translations from England.

Enok Mortensen's Major Fiction, Dorothy Burton Skardal

The Bridge

Enok Mortensen' s literary career was strangely divided. In the 1930s he published a play and three books of fiction in a first burst of activity that began after most other Scandinavian immigrant authors had ceased to publish or had died. After 1936, however, he abruptly ceased to publish fiction except for scattered short stories , and for many years wrote historical works in English instead. In English too was his charming autobiographical account of A Danish Boyhood in 1981. Who would have expected, then, that his last book would return to the novel form after nearly half a century …

Enok Mortensen And The History Of Danish Immigration To America, Eric Helmer Pedersen

The Bridge

Enok Mortensen is probably best known in Denmark through his activity as a guest lecturer at Askov Folk High School in the 1960s and 1970s. Within the confines of a small group of Danes with friends and family in America he also had a name as a writer of fiction. It is true that his first work Mit Folk (1932), a collection of short stories, was published in Askov, Minnesota, but his next, the novel Saledes blev jeg hjeml0s (1934) was published in Holb

Danish-American Literature In Transition, Dorothy Burton Skardal

The Bridge

Danish-American literature was written by Danish immigrants in the United States mainly about and for members of their own group. Their lives were lived in constant psychological and cultural flux undergoing the pressures of assimilation; therefore their literature both grew out of and recorded multifaceted processes of transition. Today the literature Danish immigrants wrote is itself in transition: long unread or forgotten, it is now being rediscovered by Americans of Danish heritage. This brief introduction to the main Danish-American writers is meant to stimulate still more to reclaim their heritage preserved in Danish-language fiction and poetry.

In Debt To Heritage Denmark, Hermansen-Jensen, Nysted, Otto G. Hoiberg, Reviewer, Elise Hermansen Olsen

The Bridge

This is the life story of the late Elise Hermansen Olsen, as portrayed in autobiographical materials edited admirably by her still-active husband, Dr. C. Arild Olsen. It mirrors the various interrelated ways in which Elise "lived her Danish heritage" - by use of the Danish language in speech and song, by a deep appreciation of that country's literature, by perpetuation of its characteristic customs, and by living a life geared to its distinctive values.

"Laegepraksis I Chicago," Brogede Minder, Morris Salmonsen

The Bridge

The Danish-born physician Christian Fenger, whose career was recounted by William K. Beatty in the last issue of The Bridge, was one of many Scandinavian doctors in Chicago during the boom decades one hundred years ago. In a city bursting with immigrants, some Scandinavian doctors catered to their countrymen, and had in most cases to be content with modest financial and social rewards. Others, like Fenger, affiliated with hospitals and made strong contributions to medical science of the day. By today's standards, the practice of medicine was virtually unregulated; the state of the science was in transition as research and …