Hans Christian Andersen: The Complete Fairy Tales and Stories

Author

Hans Christian Andersen

Original Work

Fairy Tales Told for Children. New Collection.

Translator

Erik Christian Haugaard

Foreword / Afterword

Virginia Haviland

Language

English

Year

1983

Publisher

Knopf

Country

United States

Pages

1120

ISBN

0385189516

0000

This definitive collection of work from Hans Christian Andersen—one of the immortals of world literature—not only includes his own notes to his stories but is the only version available in trade paperback that presents Andersen's fairy tales exactly as he collected them in the original Danish edition of 1874. Recognizing the literary merit of Andersen's own simple colloquial language, which Victorian translators and their imitators very often altered to sentimentalize or vulgarize, translator Erik Haugaard has remained faithful to the original text. The fairy tales Hans Christian Andersen wrote, such as "The Snow Queen," "The Ugly Duckling," "The Red Shoes," and "The Nightingale," are remarkable for their sense of fantasy, power of description, and acute sensitivity, and they are like no others written before or since. Unlike the Brothers Grimm, who collected and retold folklore, Andersen adopted the most ancient literary forms of the fairy tale and the folktale and distilled them into a genre that was uniquely his own.— Google Books