In the following essay, Stambaugh examines Dinesen's portrayals of the effects of patriarchal Christianity on men and women in her short fiction.

In the following essay, Sexson utilizes Hebraic law to interpret Dinesen's “The Blank Page.”

In the following essay, Wilkinson views “Sorrow-Acre” as a rewriting of Paul la Cour's “Sorg-Agre” and elucidates Dinesen's authorial intent with the story.

In the following essay, Mussari considers Dinesen's use of the color blue in the imagery of the stories comprising Winter's Tales.

In the following essay, Trousdale argues that the embedded stories within “The Deluge at Norderney” are not only tales of self-invention, but also of re-creation.

In the following essay, Aiken underscores the “conflation of exile, sexual difference, voice, and writing” in Dinesen's “The Dreamers.”

Lewis is a novelist, poet, editor, educator, and librettist. In the following essay, she discusses Out of Africa and the short stories in Seven Gothic Tales, Winter's Tales, and Last Tales, noting the thematic and stylistic differences between Dinesen's fiction and nonfiction.

In the following excerpt, Hansen provides a thematic and stylistic overview of several of Dinesen's stories.

Stambaugh is an educator, novelist, and critic whose works include The Witch and the Goddess in the Stories of Isak Dinesen (1988). In the following essay, she examines Dinesen's "complex" relationship to feminism, drawing mainly on her letters published in Letters from Africa, 1914–1931.

In the following essay on the short story "Carnival," the critics examine Dinesen's literary style, characters, and use of fantasy, while exploring the themes of aristocratic life and the role of the artist. They also discuss the influence of Aldous Huxley, Sigmund Freud, Edgar Allan Poe, Guy de Maupassant, and E. T. A. Hoffman on Dinesen's work.

In the following excerpt from an essay in which she examines Beryl Markham's West with the Night (1942) and Out of Africa, Smith considers the ways in which Dinesen's autobiographical persona reflects the influence of western colonial and patriarchal power in Africa.

[Isak Dinesen's] literary career falls into three distinct periods. There is the first, spectacular period, represented by her first three books—Seven Gothic Tales (1934), Out of Africa (1937), Winter's Tales (1942)—in which she appeared as a fully matured artist and made the reputation she has today, for her reputation still rests on her first three books. There is the long hiatus of fifteen years during which her only book was the novel, The Angelic Avengers, a thriller which s...

In the following essay, Ballaster discusses “The Monkey” as a work of female Gothic literature.

In the following essay, which was originally published in 1992, Kyndrup provides a stylistic analysis of “The Roads Round Pisa.”

In the following essay, Whissen examines the theme of the artist in several of Dinesen's works. He contends that she sees the artist as God-like, but that the human artist "is not the master of the situation, for he has an adversary in the greater artist, God."

In the following essay, Stecher-Hansen sheds light on Dinesen's feminist views through an analysis of her essay “Oration at a Bonfire” and her story “The Blank Page.”

It may seem … [that Isak Dinesen is] merely moralizing and that she conceives of art merely as the expression of some traditional religious doctrine…. It would be closer to the truth to say that she is offering art as a substitute, rather than as an apology, for religion. No one has been able to assign her beliefs to any single known religion. All that can safely be said is that she believed in a creative force which, for the sake of convenience, she called God. (p. 8) [There is] an unmistakab...

In the following essay, Barr theorizes on the importance of Isak Dinesen's works as precursors to postmodern feminist writing.

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.

In the following essay, Stoddart underscores the importance of storytelling and elucidates the theme of gravity in the stories of Seven Gothic Tales.

In the following essay, Knafo-Setton discusses the imaginative stories collected in Seven Gothic Tales, asserting that the volume contains “all her major themes and strengths without heavily indulging in her weaknesses which become more apparent in the later tales.”

In the following essay, Billy analyzes Dinesen's allusions to Norse and Teutonic mythology and Richard Wagner's The Ring cycle in order to provide insight into the feminist themes of “The Ring.”

In the following essay, Gossman describes the use of the theme of destiny and the search for human identity in three of Isak Dinesen's short stories.

In the following essay, Washington chronicles the influence of Dorothy Canfield on Dinesen's literary career, particularly her assistance in getting Dinesen's collection of short stories, Seven Gothic Tales, published.

Because the work of Isak Dinesen reflects her patrician inclinations, her skeptical view of "emancipated" women, and her high regard for the symbolic—rather than the sociological or psychological—value of art, her stories often appear fairly remote from contemporary concerns; in a world animated largely by individual striving for equality and self-realization, Dinesen seems to speak, conservatively, for values that many of us have learned to distrust. And yet, Dinesen's wo...

In the following essay, Johannesson examines the similarities between the philosophical views expressed in many of Dinesen's works and those of Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, notably themes relating to human identity, human interdependence, and passion for life.

As one would expect in a collection of this kind, most of the tales [in Carnival: Entertainments and Posthumous Tales] do not compare in vision and quality with the collections for which Dinesen is rightly best known: Seven Gothic Tales, Out of Africa, Winter's Tales, and some of Last Tales. Yet they are of interest because they give us new insight into her best work, some by showing us her beginnings and the context of her art, and some, when they break off unfinished or sound a false note, by showi...

Updike is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, short story writer, essayist, poet, dramatist, and critic. In the following essay, adapted from the "Introduction" to a special edition of Seven Gothic Tales published in honor of The Book-of-the-Month-Club's 60th anniversary, he presents an overview of Dinesen's life and discusses the main stylistic and thematic features of the collection.

In the following essay, Bassoff finds thematic connections between three Dinesen stories: “The Diver,” “Babette's Feast,” and “The Ring.”

Burgess was an esteemed English novelist, essayist, playwright, and short story writer best known for his novel A Clockwork Orange (1962). In the following review of Letters from Africa: 1914–1931, he favorably assesses Dinesen's writing style, contending that she "never fails in grace, sharpness, and humanity."

The first thing that needs to be said about this exceptional volume of letters [Letters from Africa 1914–1931] is that it has been attributed to the wrong author. "Isak Dinesen" did not come into being until 1934, almost three years after Karen Blixen had left Africa in the harrowing circumstances that inform the book's closing pages. It's worth making the distinction, if only because the distinction was of such prime importance to its originator: when Karen Blixen added &...

Fifteen years after her death Isak Dinesen seems to be little read in this country. She has become a cult figure without a cult. Few modern writers of comparable status can have been so neglected. No doubt her work has proved hard to place because it is eccentric in kind. But more than that, the stories on which her reputation must rest, while superficially accessible, demand, if they are to be properly understood, a degree of attention and interpretative effort only likely to be accorded to a writer of ack...

[Carnival, Entertainments and Posthumous Tales] are of a piece with her already published works. But, since they are the last we shall have of Dinesen, certain observations come to mind about her and her art. All has probably been said already; yet we cannot leave it at that. She is too good a writer. It is striking, for example, how at home Dinesen was in the past. In this volume, the stories go back and forth between Holland, Italy and France in the early 19th Century to Denmark and England in the 20th. W...

For Peter Matthiessen the setting is the subject; for Isak Dinesen [in her Letters From Africa, 1914–1931] it is an intermittent background. Letters from Africa but not, in proportion to the total, letters about Africa: written during the first ferment of modernism between the outbreak of World War I and the onset of a world depression, they conspicuously engage the "advanced" issues of a changing society in which Isak Dinesen was not then living, for which at heart she had little respe...

Dinesen lovers will rejoice over Carnival, a collection of eleven Dinesen stories that either have been out of print or never before published…. The stories, spanning half a century of creative effort, are of mixed quality, but all bear the inimitable Dinesen touch. All the familiar Dinesen themes are there: the double, the reality of the imagination, sorcery, the fusion of impulse and action, and above all, the joyful surrender to merciless destiny. Two stories written in 1909 anticipate Dinesen�...

Throughout [Dinesen's tales] runs a theme of common humanity surrendered in exchange for something else—pride? power? above all for the ability to turn life, with its muddle and pain, into art—exquisite where life is confused, heartless where life is passionate. (p. 15) In Carnival and in The Angelic Avengers … we have the sweepings of Dinesen's work: the former made up chiefly of stories she discarded as not good enough for publication, the latter an "entertainment...

The best of Dinesen's tales have always held a fine balance of a storytelling method derived from literary models—sagas, fairy tales—and her own piercing sense of psychological reality. In "Anna," to my mind the finest piece in [Carnival], there is a remarkable interlocking set of stories like an intricate puzzle toy that is pleasurable to the touch and equally pleasing to decode. (p. 183) When the sentiment works in Dinesen's fables as it does in "Anna...