This special issue on children’s literature and fairy tales has its focus on Hans Christian Andersen: his unique way of telling and his influence on modern Danish children’s literature, as well as the way his fairy tales are used pedagogically by teachers and by the children themselves in their play culture. Thus the articles will show a range of different perspectives on Andersen’s fairy tales. The contemporary challenge of research in children’s literature is to combine a literary perspective with other angles: children’s literature as media, as pedagogical artefact, and as raw material for children’s play. You need theoretical framing from different areas of science: in addition to literary theory you need book history, media theory, pedagogical and didactical theory, and cultural theory. This fact is mirrored in the selection of scholars and views in this volume.

The article initially points out the paradox that Hans Christian Andersen has become a cultural icon on a global scale based on translations which are often unreliable. The article further argues that this is partly due to the fact that translators in the target languages have most often translated Andersen as a writer predominantly for children, something which Andersen is not. The target language exemplified in the article is English. It is demonstrated how two central translators of Andersen into English, Erik Christian Haugaard and Jean Hersholdt, sanitise Andersen’s original texts and iron out difficult formulations and stylistic anomalies. The result is that the thematic depth and complexity of Andersen, as well as his stylistic idiom, is lost in such translations.

Children’s literature in Denmark developed in a literary culture in which various modes of expression interacted: sound, writing, visual expression and dramatic performance. This article discusses this aspect of literary history in relation to two stories by Hans Christian Andersen. The analytical backdrop is N. Katherine Hayles and her analysis of the relationship between form, medium and content; the distinction between semiotic and transmissive media suggested by Marie-Laure Ryan; John Bryant’s concept of “fluid text”; and Marah Gubar’s discussion of children as co-creators of texts. The analysis of Andersen’s short story Dance, Dance, Doll of Mine (1872) focuses on the interaction between speech, song, storytelling, written text, dance and performance, the discussions of children’s literature integrated in the text, and the concepts of childhood represented. Subsequently, the analysis addresses the different versions of the text published in different media. The analysis of In the Children’s Room (1865) focuses on this story as another meta-narrative on characteristics of children’s literature, especially the act of co-creation between child and adult. The article concludes that new aspects of children’s literature in a historical context are revealed when the focus is placed on children and readers as co-producers, and on the way in which children’s literature combines verbal, aural, visual and performative modes of expression across media.

The article investigates contemporary functions of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales, situated as they are in a cross-cultural mix between folklore, booklore and medialore, and therefore useful as “trash” in a play culture where children recycle them into FairyPlay. Folktales belong to folklore, Hans Christian Andersen’s copyright-fairy tales to booklore and the multiple versions in modern media to medialore. Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales have inspirational background in folklore, are aesthetically adapted to booklore by the author and reconstructed in innumerable ways in medialore. Originally he created culture for children by writing literary fairy tales. Pedagogues and teachers use his literary fairy tales in a diverse range of projects with children. However, we focus on culture created by children — their play culture. Hans Christian Andersen is analysed as a homo ludens, a trash-sculptor and a thing-finder, like Pippi Longstocking and like children in play. Examples of Danish children using his fairy tales are provided. Fairy tales are raw materials — trash — for their play-production, and these contemporary children muddle, mingle, remix the formulas with other materials and adjust them to play context through improvisations. So they perform what we name FairyPlay — just like Hans Christian Andersen himself did.

This article explores how and why Andersen fairy tales could be taught at school in new multimodal ways that reflect 21st century networked, digital and popular culture. Based on social semiotic theory and Dewey’s understanding of teaching and learning as “doing knowledge,” a design model is presented for teaching the multiple modes and media of Andersen’s work. It is argued that the model could contribute to a more semiotic rich and inquiry-based approach to Andersen and lead to the development of students’ semiotic competence, which may help understanding Andersen in transformative ways. The model was used for designing four experiments in an intervention in four Danish upper-secondary classes. Focusing on an experiment that explores how animated Andersen fairy tales were taught and learned in analytical and creative ways in L1/mother tongue education (MTE), the empirical analysis finds that the experiment challenges teachers’ and students’ conceptions of how Andersen could be taught and learned at school. However, findings also suggest that a multimodal and inquiry-based approach could expand the dominating understanding of how and why Andersen could be taught in the L1/MTE subject. This finding may have implications for teaching other canonical world literature, such as Shakespeare and Melville.

This article conducts a textual analysis of selected examples of contemporary Danish children’s literature with a focus on the continued inspiration and influence from H.C. Andersen’s fairy tales. The main examples in the article are texts written by the internationally awarded author Louis Jensen (b. 1943). The article begins with a brief description of Jensen’s rich oeuvre and then continues to analyze the genre patterns in one of his first fantastic tales, Skelettet på hjul (1992) [The Skeleton on Wheels]. This particular tale is selected because of its remarkable combination of realistic and magical elements, which can also be understood as a clash between different levels and messages. The structure in Jensen’s fantastic tales corresponds well with the concepts developed in Tzvetan Todorov’s 1970 theory about the fantastic in literature, so this theory is the theoretical framework in this section. To conclude, the article, selected examples of Jensen’s poetry, the so-called square stories, will be analyzed with a focus on the intertextual references to H.C. Andersen (1805-1875). Although they contain recognizable features and motifs, the square stories represent a new genre in children’s poetry and thereby a development of the concept of children’s literature.

Emma Donoghue’s Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins (1997) is a “revolutionary” rewrite of Western classical fairy tales. One distinct narrative feature of these tales is that one tale leads to another and upon finishing her tale, the female character narrator becomes the narratee/listener of the next story told by the narratee/listener in the previous tale. In this way each character narrator is both the storyteller and the listener. The fact that these character narrators are story readers, tellers, re-tellers as well as listeners raises important cognitive and rhetorical questions. What worldviews do these character narrators hold and what cognitive viewpoints do they have about their counterparts in the canonical tales? What effects have they achieved by telling their stories? And what does Donoghue intend to achieve by telling these female characters’ tales? Following the line of inquiry of cognitive and rhetorical theory of narrative, this paper argues that the female characters develop critical views of the classic fairy tale and become courageous re-creators of their lives, that their telling has made their listeners become stronger personalities, and that Donoghue’s telling invites the general reader to be active storytellers and directs their attention to the positive role that fairy tale can play in the postmodern era.

Wuthering Heights provides a good “family romance” for psychoanalysis. An interpretation of it from the perspective of Lacan’s theory of family complexes reveals the major source of the tragedy: the imbalance of the double function of the father as super-ego and ego-ideal. The neglect of the former leads to indulgence and extreme narcissism on the part of the children, while the deficiency or disillusionment of the latter results in radical diffidence and deformation of character. The orphan Heathcliff remains an orphan because of the indulgence of the foster father, while Hindley and Catherine are orphaned by the neglect of the father.

European colonizers exercised a kind of cultural hegemony over colonized people to justify their lucrative presence in their colonies. This hegemony emphasized the primitivism of colonized people, and referred to the rejection of native culture and absorption of Western civilization as the remedy for their barbarity and primitivism. Apart from the eradication of traditional values, the outcome of this process was the mental displacement, and construction of hybrid identities among colonized natives whose westernization resulted not in complete assimilation but in the duality of their character. As the protagonist of Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, Mustafa Sa’eed can be considered a hybrid character who challenges the authenticity of colonial discourse, especially the essentialism and purity propagated by the whites. Unlike the majority of papers that focus on the detrimental consequences of colonial discourse on native characters in the novel, this article offers something new to the critical discussion by examining the impacts of colonial discourse on both Mustafa Sa’eed, as the representative of indigenous characters, and British individuals that results in the victimization of both sides.

This paper highlights the emergence of Dalit autobiographical literature as a means of voicing not only the woes and pitiable plight of the Dalit women but also highlighting various instances of Dalit women who have fought against this unjust system and attained fame and respect for themselves in particular and their society at large. Throughout the world women face the ubiquitous problem of subjugation which gets heightened in case of the subaltern women. Only the pen has the voice to bring forth a massive change in the entire structural set up. Literature is not the platform for evoking sympathy from others but it’s a means by which fervor for change can develop in the minds of those who have been subjugated. It is universalising a personal pain by making it a literature of the oppressed. A reference is drawn from Baby Kamble’s autobiography The Prisons We Broke to show how the Dalit women were oppressed by their own community as well.

Vincent Fang’s love songs are a unique literary and cultural phenomenon in the contemporary Chinese media sphere. Fang critiques the habitualization and atomization of aesthetic appreciation evoked by contemporary popular lyrics. Employing Shklovsky’s theory of defamiliarization, and through an in-depth textual analysis on Fang’s lyrics, this paper finds that Fang’s lyrics illustrate a process of defamiliarization, which utilizes ancient imagery, unconventional poetic forms and language. These thematic and linguistic innovations in Fang’s lyrics reintroduce the traditional ideals of romantic love of the ancient Chinese people. They also challenge the beliefs held by contemporary Chinese music fans about love and romance, thus increasing the aesthetic value of contemporary Chinese love songs through resurrecting the ancient love traditions.