The Creative Dialectic in Karen Blixen's Essays | Marianne T. Stecher | Kieli: Englanti

This new study addresses the provocative essays of Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen), an iconic figure in Scandinavia and the Anglo-American world. Celebrated for her literary tales, Karen Blixen’s essays offer sagacious reflections on three significant challenges of the twentieth century: feminism, Nazism, and colonialism.Karen Blixen (1885–1962) contributed to topical debates in Denmark, particularly during the 1950s when her distinct voice on Danish radio became familiar to a nation of listeners. Some of her lectures, radio addresses, and newspaper chronicles were later published as essays and now constitute a distinct genre within her work. In this study, Blixen’s most important essays are critically examined for the first time.The book demonstrates that a "creative dialectic" informs these essays, an interplay of complementary opposites that Blixen sees as fundamental to human life and artistic creativity. Whether exploring questions of gender and the status of the feminist movement at mid-century, or th