Creative Processes and the Fairy Tale Manuscripts

Description

What objectives did Hans Christian Andersen pursue when working with his texts? What modifications did he make in the process? What elements did he discard, add or rewrite? And what impact do these changes have on the way we read the fairy tales? These are some of the questions this paper will address.
Since November 2020, The Hans Christian Andersen Centre and the team behind the project “Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales and Stories – The Digital Manuscript Edition” has been engaging with the extensive archive of preserved notes, sketches, drafts, fair copies and corrected proofs related to the making of Andersen’s fairy tales. We have digitized, transcribed, marked up, examined and published a significant portion of the many preserved manuscripts – and researched the creative processes behind approximately 40 of the tales and stories. You can follow the work in progress at the website www.hca.sdu.dk/manus and at our beta site https://beta.auh.sdu.dk/.
The paper will present examples of the project’s findings to address the above-mentioned questions. It will attempt to organize these findings and highlight specific characteristics of Andersen’s creative process when working with the fairy tale genre. In this connection it will draw upon and discuss the usefulness of the methods of manuscript studies and particularly genetic criticism as coined by French scholars in the 1960’es and not least as introduced to an Anglophone audience by Dirk van Hulle in his book Genetic Criticism – Tracing Creativity in Literature (2022).
The examples provided will include descriptions of Andersen’s labor with depictions of death and immortality in stories such as “The Story of a Mother” (1847), “The Psyche” (1861) and “The Ice Maiden” (1861).

Period	22. May 2025
Event title	Hans Christian Andersen: Life and Afterlife
Event type	Conference
Location	Hong Kong, ChinaShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International