The Legend of the Pied Piper in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Grimm, Browning, and Skurzynski

  • Mary Troxclair Adamson Sul Ross University

Abstract

This paper examines the changes that were made in the literary telling and retelling of the story of the Pied Piper during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, comparing the folktale “Die Kinder zu Hameln” (1816) by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, the poem “The Pied Piper of Hamelin”(1842) poem by Robert Browning, and the book What Happened in Hamelin (1979), by Gloria Skurzynski. A combination of New Historicism (a method based on the parallel reading of literary and non-literary texts from specific time periods, and comparative methodologies will be used to consider the impact of historical context, different authorial intentions via-a-vis child and adult audiences, and the intertextual relationships between these three texts.

Author Biography

Mary Troxclair Adamson, Sul Ross University
Mary Troxclair Adamson has a M.A. in Writing for Children from the University of Central Lancashire and holds a B.A. in History from Sul Ross State University. She is an independent scholar who combines her interests in history and literature as an assistant at the Bronte literary museum in Haworth, West Yorkshire. She writes for storytelling to young audiences in the classroom, while her research interests include Jewish history and historical archetypes in fairy tales and religious texts.
Issue
Vol. 17 No. 1 (2013)
Section
Jabberwocky
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