Abstract
A comparison was made of the levels and patterns of emotional tone scores in four successive versions of three stories that have been translated from German by Ellis to illustrate his argument that the Grimm Brothers made extensive revisions from the proported manuscript of the stories to their celebrated first edition versions. This objective analysis was based upon the evaluation, activity, and potency of the emotions connoted by those of the 1000 most frequent English words detected by the computer as occurring in the narratives. The stores were:The King's Daughter and The Enchanted Prince: Frog King, Sleeping Beauty, andThe Little Brother and Little Sister (Hansel and Gretel). Changes in story length, in mean levels of emotional tone, and in patterns of emotional tone across story versions support Ellis's judgement that subsequent revisions were less drastic than the first one, from the manuscript. It was also shown that the stories are quite different from each other in level and pattern of emotional tone.
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References
Anderson, C. W. and G. E. McMaster. “Modeling Emotional Tone in Stories Using Tension Levels and Categorical States.”Computer and the Humanities, 20, 1 (1986), 3–9.
Anderson, C. W. and G. E. McMaster. “Objective Analysis of Emotional Tone in Stories and Poems.”ALLC Journal, 3, 1 (1982), 45–51.
Ellis, J. M.One Fairy Story Too Many: The Brothers Grimm and Their Tales. Chicago and London: the University of Chicago Press, 1983.
Lefftz, J., ed.Marshen der Bruder Grimm. Urfassung nach der Originalhandschrift der Abtei Olenberg in Elsa B. Heidelberg, 1927. Cited in Ellis, J. M.One Fairy Story Too Many: The Brothers Grimm and Their Tales. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983.
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Clifford W. Anderson is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Brandon University (Manitoba, Canada). He is interested in the role of emotion in human motivation and in the objective measurement of its expression in poems, short stories, advertising copy, stories written by and for children, and other narratives. The computer system that he has developed for this purpose, with Dr. G. E. McMaster, depends upon universal qualities of English so that it can be used across authors and materials and, potentially, languages.
George E. McMaster is a Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at Brandon University. He has published articles in such journals as the British Computer Journal, the Journal of Linear and Multi-Linear Algebra, the Canadian Journal of Operational Research and Language Encoding, Computers and the Humanities, and the ALLC Journal. His current research interests include the development of management information systems software, data base design, and the modelling of excitement in literature.
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Anderson, C.W., McMaster, G.E. Quantification of rewriting by the Brothers Grimm: A comparison of successive versions of three tales. Comput Hum 23, 341–346 (1989). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02176639
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02176639