A Study Of The Image Of The East In The Fairy Tales Of Hans Christian Andersen

In his fairy tales, Hans Christian Andersen(1805—1875) pays special attention to the East. Imagination of the East exits in about 30 percent of his all fairy tales. Andersen's strong interesting to the East comes from the sub-cultural context he lives in, and is decided his special experience and personality. The specialty of the sub-cultural context and the individual context results in the specialty of the image of the East in Andersen'sfairy tales.Through a careful study to the image of the East in different periods, this article points that, compared with some other European writers contemporaneous, Andersen's Eastern narration expresses his principle of equality when looking at others. Based upon the principle of equality to foreign culture, by words and phrases, themes, and images in writing, Andersen's Eastern imagination can avoid becoming stereotype which commonly exits in contemporaneous works, present the characteristic of multielement in meaning, and embody a kind of cosmopolitism in the author's mind. Cosmopolitism in Andersen's mind is also displayed by the interconnection between his fairy tales and The Arabian Nights, which is Eastern cannon. The inference of The Arabian Nights to Andersen can be found in the plots, mode of narration, and characters of his fairy tales, which shows that what he focuses on is to comprehend foreign countries based on the artistry and the world literature. Furthermore, Andersen's frequently writing to the other European countries and peoples, as the image of the East, is also the result of observing the world and expressing himself through his extensive heart and active spirit. The writing of foreign lands represented by the image of the East not only enriches Andersen's fairy tales in extension and intension, but also endows them with more open space to interpret. Furthermore, narration of foreign lands strengthens the strangeness of the text on the level of aesthetics and indicates the author's humanism spirit, which is of importance in the course of the fairy tales come into being canon. Therefore, the image of the East on the one hand helps us master the writer's special intercultural mind in a special context, and on the other hands, makes us understand the fairy tales classical character.