For my text analysis, I chose to look at 5 different stories written by Hans Christian Andersen. Four out of my five texts include multiple different fairytales within their own text. The fifth one I chose was an autobiography, written by Andersen before the rest of my corpus was published. I wanted to use these texts and compare Andersen’s writing throughout them all. Using Voyant as well as the work I did with encoding one of the stories, I found some things that Andersen does consistently throughout all of his work.
Andersen’s work is very dialect heavy. Most of his stories are told through characters having conversations or characters telling the story themselves. This can be seen when looking at the trends section in Voyant.
The word “said” is used a total of 1,663 times throughout all of the chosen texts. This graph also shows how strong the usage of “said” is. For example, on the graph you can see that “said” was written 630 times in What The Moon Saw: and Other Tales yet only written 41 times in The Nightingale. This also correlates with how long the documents are. What The Moon Saw is 147,417 words long, while Nightingale is only 3,650 words long. After doing some of my own calculations, this is almost equally proportionate in the usage of the word “said”. * The same can be said about the other most used words in Andersen’s works. They all are proportionate in usage to the length of the text. We would expect to see a word pop us less in a shorter story than a longer one because of the amount of space available to use that word.
The graph can also show us the use of descriptive words that Andersen uses in his stories. The second and third most used words are “little” and “old” respectively.
If you look at some of the other words, we see “like” “came” and “good” are also highly used words in these works. This can lead us to the assumption that Andersen likes to use descriptive words in his work a lot, which can also show an attention to detail or a well thought out story. These words also show a focus on the look, or age of the character, as “little” and “old” create a certain picture compared to “good” and “young”.
In “The True Story of My Life” Andersen tells us about where he comes from. He describes the islands that are Denmark and gives a detailed explanation about his town.
<My native land, Denmark, is a poetical land, full of popular traditions,
old songs, and an eventful history, which has become bound up with that of Sweden and Norway.
The Danish islands are possessed of beautiful beech woods, and corn and clover fields: they resemble gardens on a great scale. Upon one of these green islands, Funen, stands Odense,
the place of my birth.>
Given the way he speaks about his hometown, and the fact that he uses it as a place setting in his stories, we can infer that he had a great love for the place he was born. He uses Odense as the setting for his story “The Bell’s Hollow”.
<"Ding-dong! ding-dong!" sounded from the buried bell
in Odensee river. What sort of a river is that?
Every child in the town of Odensee knows it.>
He also uses Odense in his story “The Bell-Deep”, which is like “The Bell’s Hollow” as the main character is a bell, but the story itself is fairly different.
Looking at the characters of his stories, Andersen tends to lean towards characters that are not human, whether they be animals or inanimate objects, like a bell. He uses characters like a mouse, the birds, an apple branch, and the sunbeam. His story “The Quickest Runners” is a conversation between all animals and inanimate objects, there are no humans in his story at all. This is not to say that he doesn’t use humans as characters. There are plenty of stories that have humans as a side character and even the central character, however he seems to have a liking for nontraditional main characters. He also draws from mythical or magical characters. He uses elves, mermen, and goblins.
It’s no surprise that Andersen’s stories are fairly popular, some of them being turned into Disney movies, like “The Emperor's New Clothes” being turned into “The Emperor’s New Groove” or “The Ugly Duckling”. His ability to tell a story through a lot of dialogue but also including enough detail to draw an image for the reader makes his stories fun and easy to read. His ability to draw from real life and add in abnormal main characters appeals to the audience, mainly children, although adults can find a sense of comfort in his stories. He knows how to write and you can see his writing did not vary drastically from year to year. Andersen knew what worked for his stories and he stuck to that.
*Note: my calculations: