Kategoria BISAC: Social Science >> Folklore & Mythology

Dennis Tedlock presents startling new methods for transcribing, translating, and interpreting oral performance that carry wide implications for all areas of the spoken arts. Moreover, he reveals how the categories and concepts of poetics and hermeneutics based in Western literary traditions cannot be carried over in their entirety to the spoken arts of other cultures but require extensive reevaluation.

David Hufford's work exploring the experiential basis for belief in the supernatural, focusing here on the so-called Old Hag experience, a psychologically disturbing event in which a victim claims to have encountered some form of malign entity while dreaming (or awake). Sufferers report feeling suffocated, held down by some "force," paralyzed, and extremely afraid.

The experience is surprisingly common: the author estimates that approximately 15 percent of people undergo this event at some point in their lives. Various cultures have their own name for the phenomenon and have...

To protect their identity and values, Africans enslaved in America transformed various familiar character types to create folk heroes who offered models of behavior both recognizable to them as African people and adaptable to their situation in America.

Roberts specifically examines the Afro-American trickster and the trickster tale tradition, the conjurer as folk hero, the biblical heroic tradition, and the badman as outlaw hero.

Who would not shudder when entering the skeleton-lined cave of the queen of the dead? How would a young man and his sister escape from the prison of a treacherous sultan? How would a poor farmer gain the hand of the beautiful daughter of the wealthiest sheik? These and thirteen more tales are spun in this stunning collection of sixteen traditional stories from the Shia tribes of southern Iraq. Gathered in the late 1940s and deftly translated to capture the elegance of the originals, these tales are full of action, adventure, love, and humor and are sure to delight anyone who has ever...

"Clean, crisp, startling, intelligent and fun, these fictionalized case studies show that life imitates art -- and that art tells the stronger truths." -- James Hillman Author of A...