Telling Tales: The Impact of Germany on English Children’s Books 1780-1918

One should not use the designation ‘standard work’ lightly, but this book well deserves the accolade. It will, over time, become the touchstone for much fruitful investigation.

Germany has had a profound influence on English stories for children. The Brothers Grimm, The Swiss Family Robinson and Johanna Spyri’s Heidi quickly became classics but, as David Blamires clearly articulates in this volume, many other works have been fundamental in the development of English children’s stories during the 19th century and beyond.

Telling Tales is the first comprehensive study of the impact of Germany on English children’s books, covering the period from 1780 to the First World War. Beginning with The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, moving through the classics and including many other collections of fairytales and legends, it covers a wealth of translated and adapted material.

Since publication this book has been viewed over 4500 times. Last updated March 2013.

Title: Telling Tales
Subtitle: The Impact of Germany on English Children’s Books 1780-1918
Author: Blamires, David
Publication date: October 2009
Number of pages: xi + 459
Dimensions: 6.14” x 9.21” | 234mm x 156mm
Illustrations: 34 black and white
BIC Subject Code: DSY (Children's & teenage literature studies)

Telling Tales: The Impact of Germany on English Children’s Books 1780-1918  by David Blamires is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

Introduction

1. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen

2. A World of Discovery: Joachim Heirich Campe

3. Elements of Morality: Salzmann and Wollstonecraft

4. Musäus and the Beginnings of the Fairytale

5. Discovering Germany

6. The Swiss Family Robinson

7. Moral, Didactic and Religious Tales

8. Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué: Undine and Sintram

9. Adelbert von Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihl

10. The Fairytales of the Brothers Grimm

11. The Fairytales of Wilhelm Hauff

12. The Folktale Tradition in Germany

13. E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Nutcracker and Mouse King

14. Lesser Fairytales Authors

15. Clemens Brentano’s Fairytales

16. Learning about German History

17. The Thirty Years War

18. Historical Tales and Adventure Stories

19. Picture Books

20. Sigfried and the Nibelungenlied

21. The Franco-Prussian War

22. German Books for Girls

23. Children’s Books and the First World War

Primary Texts

Select Bibliography

Index

David Blamires is formerly Professor of German at the University of Manchester. His publications include Characterization and Individuality in Wolfram’s ‘Parzival’; David Jones: Artist and Writer; Herzog Ernst and the Otherworld Journey: a Comparative Study; Happily Ever After: Fairytale Books through the Ages; Margaret Pilkington 1891-1974; Fortunatus in his Many English Guises; Robin Hood: a Hero for all Times and The Books of Jonah. He also guest-edited a special number of the Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester on Children's Literature.

"This book caters for two kinds of reader. Interested amateurs will find in it an exciting story, told in accessible language and interspersed with informative sketches (plot summaries with gentle interpretations) on some of German literature’s seminal texts. Specialists in several areas — historians of British cultureof the long nineteenth century, historians of children’s literature, researchers into Anglo-German literary relations — will find in it a wealth of material for further investigation. [...] One should not use the designation ‘standard work’ lightly, but this book well deserves the accolade. It will, over time, become the touchstone for much fruitful investigation."

"The sheer mass of material and the painstaking presentation as well as the extensive bibliography and compendious index make this an excellent work of reference."