 Hans Christian Anderson: Seeing the World Through the Eyes of a Child by Teresa Martin--@Teresa__Martin Hans Christian Andersen was a Danish writer living from 1805-1875. He penned many of the great fairy tales, his stories making up the corpus of some of the classics including “The Little Mermaid,” “The Red Shoes, ”The Little Match Girl,” “The Ugly Duckling,” and “The Snow Queen.” The latter is the tale on which the Disney movie Frozen was loosely based and will play a large part on Once in the Fall. He was prolific, writing poetry and some adult literature, yet it is for his fairy tales for which he remains most famous. Andersen was unique in that most of his stories were not collections from oral folk stories, but inventions of his own and because of this some place him as a forerunner of the fantasy genre (4, 5 Wullschlager). Andersen’s stories also frequently feature the innocence, and therefore, wisdom of children. A biographer stated, ”Addressing himself to the child in the adult through a revolutionary shift in perspective, he gave voice through his characters to groups which had traditionally been mute and oppressed—the children, the poor, those who did not fit social or sexual stereotypes ” His stories indeed contain sophisticated themes. “ ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ and ‘The Ugly Duckling’ remain bywords for aspects of the human condition, while character emitting terror or sacrifice” (4,5 Wullschlager). “The Emperor’s New Clothes” is particularly a tale which epitomizes vanity, abuse of power, as well as the phenomena of mob behavior. 
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