Karen Blixen Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Casey Bjerregaard Black

SOURCE: "The Fantastic in Karen Blixen's Osceola Production," in Scandinavian Studies, Vol. 57, No. 4, Autumn, 1985, pp. 379-89.

In the following essay, Black describes Osceola as a collection of "three kinds of fantastic tales" whose "interrogations of reality" satirize bourgeois values and sensibilities.

Until recently, the only examples of Karen Blixen's juvenile works were to be found in the little known collection Osceola, in the marionette comedy Sandhedens haevn, and in the Karen Blixen Archives at the Royal Library in Copenhagen. In 1977, however, "The De Cats Family" and "Uncle Theodore" appeared, and in 1981 and 1983, several other stories in greater or lesser degrees of completion were made available through the pages of Blixeniana. Unfortunately, the newest material remains in its original Danish. And still more incomplete but lengthy fragments such as "Doris Alvarez. En spøgelseshistorie" remain in manuscript form. The relative obscurity and inaccessibility of these materials...
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