Author: David Buchan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317552903
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 343
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Book Description
The ballad is an enduring and universal literary genre. In this book, first published in 1972, David Buchan is concerned to establish the nature of a ballad and of the people who produced it through a study of the regional tradition of the Northeast of Scotland, the most fertile ballad area in Britain. His account of this tradition has two parallel aims, one specifically literary – to investigate the ballad as oral literature – and one broadly ethnographic – to set the regional tradition in its social context. Dr Buchan applies the interesting and important work which has recently been done on oral tradition in Europe on the relationship of the ballad to society to his study of this particular part of Scotland. He examines a nonliterate society to discover what factors besides nonliteracy helped foster its ballad tradition. He analyses the processes of composition and transmission in the oral ballad, and considers the changes which removed nonliteracy, altered social patterns, and seriously affected the ballad tradition. By demonstrating how people who could neither read nor write were able to compose literature of a high order, David Buchan provides a convincing explanation of the ballad’s perennial appeal and an answer to the ‘ballad enigma’. His book is also a valuable study in social history of this culturally distinct region, the Northeast of Scotland.
Author: David Buchan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131755017X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 247
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Book Description
The popular appeal of the ballad is perennial, and few literary genres give so much pleasure to so many kinds of people. This anthology, first published in 1973, is drawn from the richest ballad tradition in Britain, that of the Northeast of Scotland. It provides a fresh and original choice of songs that ranges from the old ballads like ‘Gil Brenton’ and ‘Willie’s Lady’ to the bothy ballads like ‘The Tarves Rant’. The collection illustrates the development of a tradition over the centuries from the oral stage down to the modern, and exemplifies the methods of composition and transmission, the kinds of ballad-story, and the types of ballad-text found in the various stages of a ballad tradition. It illustrates the variety of subject matter, and indicates lines of relationship with other genres of Folklore Studies. A substantial section, containing what are widely acknowledged as the best of all British ballads, the oral ballads of Anna Brown, demonstrates clearly that the ballads are not merely simple or crude poems; in their oral form, they are narrative songs of some complexity and sophistication. This anthology is complementary to Dr Buchan’s The Ballad and the Folk.
Author: David Buchan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317550048
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 255
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Book Description
Scottish folk literature is characterised by a wide range of creative expression: story, song, play and proverb. This anthology, first published in 1984, provides an authoritative introduction to Scottish folk literature, and is unique in that it deals with all the genres intrinsic to Scottish tradition. Its selected texts offer an unusual and diverse enjoyment to the reader, including such forms as wonder tales or Märhcen, classical ballads, riddles, jocular tales, lyric and comic and occupational folksongs, rhymes, historical and supernatural legends, and guisers’ plays. The texts chosen cover the main regional traditions of Lowland Scotland, from Galloway to the Shetlands, and span a number of centuries, through both pre- and post-industrial periods, from a sailor’s worksong of the sixteenth century to modern urban legends just recently recorded. The book is arranged in four sections, on Folk Narrative, Folksong, Folksay, and Folk Drama, each with an introduction and a bibliographical essay setting the material in context and indicating some of its international links. Folk literature itself is brought into firm focus by discussion and generic example, and the anthology as a whole illuminates substantial areas of Scottish social and cultural life.
Author: J.D.A. Widdowson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317551486
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 878
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Book Description
This collection of Newfoundland folk narratives, first published in 1996, grew out of extensive fieldwork in folk culture in the province. The intention was to collect as broad a spectrum of traditional material as possible, and Folktales of Newfoundland is notable not only for the number and quality of its narratives, but also for the format in which they are presented. A special transcription system conveys to the reader the accents and rhythms of each performance, and the endnote to each tale features an analysis of the narrator’s language. In addition, Newfoundland has preserved many aspects of English and Irish folk tradition, some of which are no longer active in the countries of their origin. Working from the premise that traditions virtually unknown in England might still survive in active form in Newfoundland, the researchers set out to discover if this was in fact the case.
Author: Timothy Tangherlini
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131755065X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 392
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Book Description
This book, first published in 1994, sets ‘repertoire against raconteur’ in order to explore one of the world’s largest collections of folk literature. The author’s findings, and his creative and synthetic methodologies, enhance greatly our understanding of the world of the legend, and especially the basic question of ‘Who tells what to whom in the form of a legend and why?’ This work is an in-depth exploration of rural Denmark, and provides us with an excellent vantage point from which to understand legends in their cultural contexts and within the lives of their tellers.
Author: Christine Goldberg
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317549481
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 223
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Book Description
The central tale studied in Turandot’s Sisters, first published in 1993, is The Princess Who Can Not Solve the Riddle, AT 851. Other wisdom tales are surveyed to show that they are separate from the riddle tales in material and in spirit. Customs and beliefs concerning riddling and riddle contests are examined to see what motifs from the tales are taken from reality, leaving the rest to be either fantasy motifs or stylistic traits. The central tale AT 851 is analysed in detail to exhibit its obligatory and optional elements, a wealth of possibilities that enables it to adapt to a range of moods and to express a variety of ideas.
Author: Ronald Morse
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131754921X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 239
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Book Description
Yanagita Kunio almost singlehandedly initiated the serious study of folklore in Japan. Even modern Japanese folklorists who may disagree with his approach or his methods must take his body of work as a point of departure for their own. This book, first published in 1990, puts Yanagita’s career within a historical framework and context, full of detail about Japanese political and literary trends which influenced or were influenced by the folklore scholarship of Yanagita.
Author: Wolfgang Mieder
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317549244
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 607
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Book Description
The twenty essays that comprise this book, which was first published in 1994, were written by leading paremiologists and folklorists from Africa, Canada, Great Britain, Germany and the US. They represent the best scholarship on proverbs in the English language, and together they give an impressive overview of the fascinating advances in the field of paremiology.
Author: David Buchan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131755289X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 314
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Book Description
The ballad is an enduring and universal literary genre. In this book, first published in 1972, David Buchan is concerned to establish the nature of a ballad and of the people who produced it through a study of the regional tradition of the Northeast of Scotland, the most fertile ballad area in Britain. His account of this tradition has two parallel aims, one specifically literary – to investigate the ballad as oral literature – and one broadly ethnographic – to set the regional tradition in its social context. Dr Buchan applies the interesting and important work which has recently been done on oral tradition in Europe on the relationship of the ballad to society to his study of this particular part of Scotland. He examines a nonliterate society to discover what factors besides nonliteracy helped foster its ballad tradition. He analyses the processes of composition and transmission in the oral ballad, and considers the changes which removed nonliteracy, altered social patterns, and seriously affected the ballad tradition. By demonstrating how people who could neither read nor write were able to compose literature of a high order, David Buchan provides a convincing explanation of the ballad’s perennial appeal and an answer to the ‘ballad enigma’. His book is also a valuable study in social history of this culturally distinct region, the Northeast of Scotland.
Author: Zinta Konrad
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317551737
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 315
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Book Description
The trickster character is prominent in the cultural, particularly narrative, traditions of many different peoples throughout the world. Comic and serious, stupid and clever, benevolent and evil, winner and loser, the trickster is a study in contradictions. The trickster cannot be pigeonholed, for he does not fit into any neat categories or definitions. This study, first published in 1994, aims to give the reader the opportunity to experience in some small measure the dynamic and exciting dramatic oral narrative performances of the Ewe people of West Africa.
