In an April 1926 letter to her brother Thomas, Isak Dinesen complains bitterly about her âpathetic âauthorship,ââ frustrated that all her ideas for literary compositions in different genres invariably âturn into mbuni before my pen can touch them.â Whether the book at hand amounts to more than so much mbuni â a waste product from the manufacture of coffee â is for others to judge. That the book exists at all is due to the help and good will of many people.
I owe gratitude, for example, to Brillâs anonymous peer reviewers and to the many colleagues in Denmark and abroad (none mentioned, none forgotten) who have read, listened to, and engaged with my arguments in various formats and professional settings over the years. The winds of change that currently sweep across the academic landscape make me grateful, too, for having been privileged to work with companionable colleagues under relatively stable conditions and capable management at the Aarhus University English Department for more than twenty-five years. My family deserves great credit for their faith in my project, their tolerance for Dinesen-related lore, and the good cheer with which they have countenanced my sometimes gloomy musings on issues like climate change and the future of humanities research. Friends and teammates of my table tennis club, the magnificent Sisu/MBK, have given much-needed relief from logocentric overload. Finally, I should not neglect to thank the Carlsberg Foundation for generously granting me a one-year monograph fellowship, without which I would scarcely have been able to collect the scattered strands of my thought.
The discussions that follow incorporate some elements of these previously published texts, which are here used with permission:
- ââBoth Men and Beastsâ: Rereading Karen Blixenâs Anthropomorphisms. Orbis Litterarum 73, vol. 6 (2018): 506â519 (chapter two).
- ââA Coffee-Plantation is a Thing that Gets Hold of You and Does Not Let You Goâ: Plant- Writing in Karen Blixenâs Out of Africa. Journal of Literary Studies 35, vol. 4 (2019): 28â45 (chapter two).
- ââThe Juices of the Bodyâ: Ecomasculine Fluidification in Two Stories by Isak Dinesen. Men and Masculinities 25, vol. 1 (2022): 106â125 (chapter three).
- âWitchesâ Milk: Queer Breastfeeding and Alternative Kin-Making in Isak Dinesenâs âThe Caryatids.â NORA: Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research 30, vol. 4 (2022): 264â277 (chapter four).
- âIsak Dinesenâs Weird Voodoo Novel. Journal of Horror Studies 14, vol. 1 (2023): 29â45 (chapter five).
The work presented here is supported by the Carlsberg Foundation, grant CF24-2260.