A professor of English at City College of New York-Queen's College, Richter is the author of Fable's End: Completeness and Closure in Rhetorical Fiction and Ten Short Novels. In the following essay, he discusses what he calls the "covert plot" of "Sorrow-Acre, " stating that Dinesen encrypted the secret meaning into her story in a gesture of cultural elitism
Perhaps none of Isak Dinesen's novellas has been more ad1nired, and certainly none has been more widely anthologized, than "Sorrow-Acre,". originally published with her Winter's Tales in 1942. This lyrically tragic tale, set in Denmark in the 1770s, invokes many of the persistent themes that haunt Dinesen's work: the contrast between the cruel beauty of the ancien regime and the more prosaic humanitarian ethos of modem democracy that will inevitably displace it; the inextricable connections between.....
This is a free excerpt of 135 words. This section contains 3,778 words. This
study guide contains 15,655 words (approx. 52 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Literature Guide with our Sorrow-Acre Access Pass.
