If these allusions, plots and characters are not subjected to meticulous scrutiny that also take in extratextual historical and literary historical knowledge that plays a significant role in Blixen’s tales as has been pointed out by Behrendt (Behrendt 2007 Behrendt 2010a), it is for the most part impossible to understand her works. When reading Blixen it is easy to go astray in all these allusions that often seem to blur the picture more than they clarify.
In her tales we find an unusually high, almost excessive, number of allusions to world literature (including the bible and Greek mythology) and in her Danish versions also countless allusions to Danish literature (primarily to 19th century writers). It has become more and more clear to me from my work with Blixen’s works in relation to Kierkegaard that one of Blixen’s ways of becoming a part of world literature was to deliberately deal with it in her works and for the most part in a subversive way. The three articles are framed by a background section that consists of 1) a research survey of the Blixen-Kierkegaard research scholarship, 2) reflections over the theory and method used in each of the three articles and 3) additional analyses of selected tales by Blixen with particular attention to Kierkegaard and the topics of gender and Christianity and finally 4) a concluding chapter that ties the observations from the articles and the background section together. Karen Blixen’s ‘Carnival’ in the Light of Søren Kierkegaard” has been published in the journal Scandinavica (2:2011), the second “‘Ehrengard,’ Kierkegaard, and the Secret Note” has been accepted by the journal Scandinavian Studies and is scheduled to appear in the winter 2013 issue and the third “Karen Blixen’s ‘The Poet’ and Søren Kierkegaard’s Gjentagelsen” has been submitted to the European Journal of Scandinavian Studies but has not yet been peer reviewed. At the time of writing the first article “Flappers and Macabre Dandies. This means that it consists of three articles and a background section. This thesis falls into the category of an article Ph.D.
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