Isak Dinesen

This historical overview of criticism of the famous Danish writer is the first such collection available in English. Composed of selections from major critics and scholars both here and abroad (including Aage Henriksen, Eudora Welty, Curtis Cate, Abdul JanMohamed, and Lionel Trilling, among others), Isak Dinesen would have suited the self-absorbed artist, who so delighted in being continually appropriated and invented within different forms of critical discourse that it became a source of amusement and distraction for her. For us, it is a reminder that literary works and their authors must yield gracefully to critical shaping for a literary reputation to take on a life of its own. To watch the unfolding of reputation under such continual reinvention becomes high literary spectacle. Readers of this collection will witness a major twentieth-century writer emerge from the judgments imposed by various critical schools in vogue from the early 1950s.