Sorrow-Acre | Covert Plot in Isak Dmesen's Sorrow-Acre
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 "covertplot" 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 admired, 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 ancient regime and the more prosaic humanitarian ethos of modern democracy that will inevitably displace it; the inextricable connections between men and the land they live on; the arcane routes by which men seek and find...
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