Cultural Impact
"The Most Incredible Thing" was the first Andersen story published during the Nazi occupation of Denmark during World War II. The introduction to the July 1940 edition suggested Andersen had written the tale in profound anxiety and doubt over the future that "was superseded with an even more profound faith." In 1942, the tale was published in a volume of stories organized by scholars who would later become leaders of the Danish Resistance Movement. In the tale’s final illustration to the 1942 edition, the night watchman is a bearded rabbi who strikes down the brawny semi-naked Aryan destroyer of the clock while a crowd of Danes in contemporary 1940s dress stands by and watches.
Read more about this topic: The Most Incredible Thing
Famous quotes containing the words cultural and/or impact:
“Somehow we have been taught to believe that the experiences of girls and women are not important in the study and understanding of human behavior. If we know men, then we know all of humankind. These prevalent cultural attitudes totally deny the uniqueness of the female experience, limiting the development of girls and women and depriving a needy world of the gifts, talents, and resources our daughters have to offer.”
—Jeanne Elium (20th century)
“One can describe a landscape in many different words and sentences, but one would not normally cut up a picture of a landscape and rearrange it in different patterns in order to describe it in different ways. Because a photograph is not composed of discrete units strung out in a linear row of meaningful pieces, we do not understand it by looking at one element after another in a set sequence. The photograph is understood in one act of seeing; it is perceived in a gestalt.”
—Joshua Meyrowitz, U.S. educator, media critic. “The Blurring of Public and Private Behaviors,” No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press (1985)