The thematic issue on the fairy tale consists of eight articles: one on the Cuban fairy tale, one on tales by the Brothers Grimm, one on the Norwegian fairy tale, and five on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales. The articles are testimony to the fact that the fairy tale is alive and well and that it is the subject of a rich variety of scholarly interpretations. The juxtaposition of articles on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales and articles on other tales is deliberate; it serves to show how Andersen’s special fairy tale, the so‑called “artistic fairy tale,” or “art fairy tale” (Kunsteventyr), differs from the fairy tale tradition. Andersen’s break with tradition may indeed constitute the reason for his appeal to adult readers today.

African‑Cuban art manifests a specific African sense of the continuity of life and death; the two are magically connected and this unique perspective produces a rich creativity based on the notion that everything is related and exists in the single moment. Lydia Cabrera, who is responsible for having saved the African poetical, magic wisdom preserved in Afro‑Cuban art, studied painting in Paris and gained a European perspective on the African literature. Afro‑Cuban literature is imbued with a mythical shamanic diction that manifests itself in the fairy tale of that country. The African element, which is potently present in the tale, is derived from African slaves in Cuba, among whom the author Cabrera was raised, therefore acquiring an intimate knowledge of their beliefs and sensibilities. Cabrera also spent time in Spain, and in 1936 she published a French translation of Negro Fairy Tales from Cuba. She was not the only Cuban traveling to Europe, in the 1930s, the young painter Wifredo Lam visited Paris and exhibited with Picasso. Lam’s paintings fascinated the writer Carpentier who is inspired by them to write a preface to one of his works which becomes a manifesto on “the real‑marvellous”, “lo real‑maravilloso”. Afro‑Cuban literature makes use of the metaphor of the mirror and water as an image of death. This literature may be interpreted as a kind of “text theatre”, a dramatic performance using the mask, the ritual and the doll—emblem of female magic and fertility—in a combination of picture and drama.

The article focuses on the cardinal virtues of faithfulness and loyalty as they manifest themselves in “The Frog Prince,” “Faithful John,” and “The Three Snake Leaves.” Extreme loyalty is shown in the first tale as the servant mourns the loss and metamorphosis of his prince; referring to Freud’s “reality principle” and “pleasure principle,” the author demonstrates how the servant in “Faithful John” follows the former while his master is in the grips of the latter. The author also makes use of Bruno Bettelheim’s Freudian analysis and indicates how the significance of the number three in the fairy tale may be connected with the Oedipal triangle. The tale “The Three Snake Leaves” once again rewards an uncompromisingly faithful servant, here a soldier in the service of his king. The soldier is also involved in a particularly interesting, complex erotic relationship with the princess.

The article describes how modern European ideas of nationalism and democracy in the early and mid‑nineteenth century inspired Norwegians to search for a national identity by collecting folk art that indicated cultural differences between “us” and “them”—“them” referring to Europeans in general and the Danes in particular. Politically speaking, the difference from the Danes was obvious: Norway never had feudal aristocracy nor bonded peasantry. The theory of the influence of climate and physical environment on culture and character helped create a specific sense of Norwegianness: the folklore of Norway was oral and had to be collected and written down, which was done by Asbjørnsen and Moe in the 1840s, and their collections accentuated the fairy tale as distinctly Norwegian because of its black humor, the talent‑hidden hero, and the gracefully yet independent women characters. The fairy tales have successful endings; by contrast, the legends are more realistic and psychologically diverse. The language of tales and legends is a compromise between written Danish and Norwegian dialects. Ballads were also collected by Landstad and Croeger at the end of the nineteenth century, which portray courtly love and help to show that the Norwegian farmer was a subject of the King, not a serf like his Danish counterpart. Norwegian folk music and folk art in general inspired musicians and writers, and folk art was also significantly present in modern Norwegian politics as the new “National Left” found its cultural and social identity in folklore. The emphasis on her “folk” identity became significant when Norway broke out of the union with Sweden in 1905.

The article examines the language in Andersen’s earliest fairy tales, concentrating on the radical changes from the very first tale “Dødningen” (1830) to “The Tinderbox” in the first separate volume from 1835 and other early tales. It is shown how Andersen soon discarded the heavy Germanic constructions that were the norm in the works of many of his contemporaries in favour of a simple style that was suited for children, though he always had his “double audience” in mind. As a consequence, the language in the tales from 1835 onwards often imitates the spoken language by means of such features as direct speech, onomatopoeic expressions, exclamations and repetitions, as well as a strong dose of humour. Andersen’s frequent use of modal adverbs (or discourse particles) adds subtle nuances to his language which are virtually impossible to convey in translations of the works into English. Further, Andersen’s paratactic syntax (i.e. writing in long sentences consisting almost exclusively of main clauses with very few subordinate clauses in between) results in a lively, rhythmic style and a quick tempo, which are both generally lost in English translations. The paper provides examples of some of these difficulties that face all translators.

The fairy tale in Poland was thought to be exclusively a genre for children, but the Danes were inclined to have a slightly different perspective. The tradition of the “Kunstmärchen” made the fairy tale an accepted adult art form in nineteenth‑century Germany, and via close links with German Romanticism the genre was also accepted as an adult literature in Denmark. That approach provided a firm foundation for Andersen’s acceptance as a serious writer. But at the same time Andersen himself equipped his first edition with the title Fairy Tales Told for Children, which put him in the category of children’s literature. In other words, as one of the first authors he dared to make use of the dual addressee. In the tales he took up issues of adult life (sexual love, social differences) but still wrote genuine children’s literature, using the mode of enormous appeal to children (humor, straightforwardness). The dual address made the problem of translating Andersen into Polish really complex. Some translators used the German text, others tried their best with the original Danish, some attempted to convert Andersen’s consciously negligent narrative style into something more formally correct, but the fundamental problem was that the Polish translations up to the year 2005 were made mostly for children, omitting the other parallel addressee: the adult. This article investigates three Polish translations of Andersen’s tales in the light of the writer’s dual appeal: to children and adults.

The article discusses the potential for intercultural exchange to be found in Andersen’s fairy tales, particularly the so‑called “art fairy tale,” or, as it is most commonly called in English: Kunstmärchen. The typically Danish national characteristics described and often ironically exposed in tales like “The Ugly Duckling” and “The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep” are only one of Andersen’s trademarks. These tales transcend national borders, containing more universal motifs, including the motif of love. But Andersen’s tales have a wider appeal in the age of globalization, as the author points out. The Chinese have been deeply inspired by the tales, especially those that deal with philosophical, ethical, and existential issues. Frandsen comments that ancient Chinese wisdom and culture is based on examples rather than on systematic metaphysics, and this may be one reason why most Chinese adults know tales like “The Little Mermaid,” “The Story of a Mother,” and “The Little Girl with the Match Sticks.” A joint research project between the University of Southern Denmark and Fudan University, Shanghai, is ongoing, and this will certainly be an occasion for furthering common Danish‑Chinese research on Andersen.

The article relates how 1867 was an eventful year for Andersen: he was made honorary citizen of his hometown, Odense, Denmark, and endowed with the title of councillor of state, a title that pleased him especially because he viewed it as an opportunity to play the role of modern artist in the company of monarchs and wealthy patrons as well as the common people. Andersen enjoyed travelling as it further enhanced his exposure to the public eye, and he visited the World Exhibition of 1867 in Paris, where he felt out of place, finding everything strange and estranging, and he wrote a fairy tale about the Exhibition, “The Dryad.” Mai shows how Andersen’s paper cuts also depict the negative side of modernity, and how the fairy tale is really an epistemological genre expressing dreams and longing, but in the reverse, since “The Dryad” and “The Little Mermaid” are about spirits that long for the human world. Mai notes that Andersen was portrayed in a small porcelain figure manufactured in 1812; the figure expresses the writer’s dreams of freedom and writing as well as his bourgeois cultural refinement. Andy Warhol’s portrait of Andersen from 1987 shows how the dream of freedom of Romanticism permeates the artist’s work, and the Danish sculptor Bjørne Nørregaard’s statue from 2005, placed in Odense, expresses three conflicting aspects of Andersen’s personality: the writer, the traveller, and the self‑doubting modern artist. On the whole, Andersen’s life and work are strikingly modern.

The article shows how Andersen’s narrative technique discards both the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic approach to the fairy tale, in that the story reverses or inverts the fairy‑tale structure, thus becoming modern and comparable to the fiction of, for example, Nikolai Gogol, Franz Kafka, and Bruno Schulz. Binary oppositions such as ‘light’ and ‘shadow’ are transcended, and like Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass the learned young man’s shadow approaches a type of knowledge different from the True, the Good and the Beautiful; but The Shadow (italicized by Andersen) approaches this type of knowledge in reverse, claiming that he has seen “everything” whereas in fact he has seen “nothing.” Since The Shadow nevertheless emerges victorious and marries the princess in the end, Andersen has reached the end of the fairy tale and is writing something else. Salman Rushdie’s novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories contains explicit allusions to Andersen’s story so that the two texts may be viewed as intertexts. Further, “The Shadow” may be compared to Bruno Schulz’s “Under the Sign of the Hourglass”; Paul Auster’s “Portrait of an Invisible Man”; and Haruki Murakami’s story TV People. The Shadow is a three‑fold metaphor of inversion: the inversion of the self, of knowledge, and of language. Andersen discards mimetic poetry and engages in a pre‑modernist critique of logos. This critique culminates in the insight that there is no source of the light emanating from the figure of Poetry in the story; the light is an immanent illumination and cannot be represented; representation is distortion and The Shadow’s knowledge is a deviant form of investigation of that which is hidden and secret.

From its very beginning, the Slovene literary culture has been oriented towards the European, or, in the last decades, the world literary field. This holds true for literary production itself as well as for literary studies. Slovene literature has always been strongly tied to the international literary periods, currents, and movements, being in a constant productive dialogue with them. Consequently, beside the national literary history, quite soon the discipline of Comparative Literature emerged, and Anton Ocvirk’s The Theory of Comparative Literary History (1936) appeared as the third monograph on Comparative Literature worldwide.

We could be forgiven for asking why Joseph K. was one of those modern heroes who took root, to the point of us identifying with him. We see our own fate in his, our own life’s “trial.” This same question, however, applies equally well to Hamlet and Oedipus. These, too, are our “alter egos”; the latter in particular still stands for “the most versatile work of world literature” (Lesky 48). This work not only influenced Shakespeare but no doubt others as well. We shall argue that Franz Kafka was one of those. Philosophical questions about guilt and punishment, liberty, decision‑making, agency, and death have the same weight in Kafka as they do in Sophocles. The similarities between the two are astounding, even though it might be difficult to perceive them at first sight according to Dönt. A comparison of the two texts is therefore bound to open up new layers of understanding of Oedipus Rex by Sophocles.

The article takes a critical stance towards the Anglo‑American use of the term short story as a collective label for the entire domain of short prose. Partially based on German literary criticism, which makes a clear distinction between the novella and the short story, it attempts to demonstrate that within the realm covered by the American term short story there are at least two, perhaps even three, genres with differing formal structures, organization of narrative, ideological basis, and pragmatic motivation.

This essay intends to present some characteristic changes, i.e., the inventions of motifs (referring to some new materials) and inventions in narrative strategies in the genre of the historical novel in the case of the Slovene historical novel, i.e., the historical novel written in the Slovene language and referring to the Slovene historical‑cultural context, at the beginning of the 21st century, or more precisely, after 1990, when the Slovene cultural community, self‑identified as a national community, gained state‑political emancipation. These new political‑historical conditions, as well as the agent of post‑structuralist thought, strengthened the tendency to multiply the historical imagination and the concepts of history or historiography. Explaining the innovations in motifs and narrative strategies of the Slovene historical novel will be based on a short theoretical introduction, which takes into account the agent of post‑structuralist metahistory, of political history, J. M. Lotman’s concept of the semiosphere and its accommodation to the ideological‑critical perspective on the genre of the historical novel.

In the voice Perloff added when she made comparative studies on Modernist and Postmodernist lyric in Poetic License, we hear three things: her understanding of poetic license, her view on modernism and postmodernism, and her critical formula of formalism + cultural studies. It is this voice that we need to listen to as it is distinctive and remarkable, particularly today when we are puzzled about what’s going on “after theory.”

Nie Zhenzhao and his colleagues are exemplarily successful in turning out English Literature in the Perspective of Ethical Literary Criticism, an insightful book that merits our attention. It aims to search for a new critical approach to literature—namely, ethical literary criticism. Nie does an admirable job of identifying a largely neglected area in literary studies that seeks to reveal and unearth the ethical heart of British writers’ vision in China. His methodology is forthright and clear as he strives for an ethical approach to English literature.