Kategoria BISAC: Social Science >> Folklore & Mythology

In Liberating Shahrazad, Suzanne Gauch analyzes how postcolonial writers and filmmakers from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia have reclaimed the storyteller in order to portray Muslim women in ways that highlight their power to shape their own destinies. Gauch looks at Maghrebian works that incorporate Shahrazad's storytelling techniques into...

"Stars Fell on Alabama" is truly a classic.The book enjoyed enormous popularity and notoriety when it was first published (it was a selection of The Literary Guild and also sold widely in Europe). Itcan be described as a book of folkways not journalism, or history, or a novel.At times it is impressionistic; at other times it conveys deep insights into the character of Alabama.Carmer visited every region of the state, always accompanied by someone intimately familiar with the locality.The mosaic that emerges from the pages of his book portrays Alabama s human landscape in all its variety,...

Primitive Baptist singing traditions in the South.
This collection of essays, best described as an extended set of liner notes to its accompanying compact disc, frames its topic with deceptive modesty. Benjamin Lloyd (1804 60) was a Primitive Baptist preacher, who in 1841 published some 535 hymn texts under the title "Primitive Hymns." "Lloyd s Hymnal" (as it is often called now) has been a small but consistent seller ever since, finding wide use among Primitive Baptists throughout the South. The CD as well as the book] appropriately uses" Lloyd s" as a point of reference from which...

"Storytellers," a rich collection of more than 250 authentic folktales, confirms the oral tradition of the South. Rising out of a shared rural past, the legends and myths, the jests and trickster tales presented here are as diverse and inventive as the tellers themselves.

Edited and introduced by John A. Burrison and selected from more than twenty years of recorded interviews conducted in the lower Southeast by folklore students, "Storytellers" brings together for the first time in one book a broad variety of tales told in voices of African American, Anglo-Saxon, and Native American...

"Ghosts and Goosebumps" is a rich collection of folktales and superstitions that capture the oral traditions of central and southeastern Alabama. In its pages one can glimpse the long-lost horse-and-buggy times, when people sat up all night with the dead and dying, hoed and handpicked cotton, drew water from wells, and met the devil rather regularly.

The book is divided into three parts--tales, superstitions, and slave narratives. The spirits of treasure-keepers, poltergeists, murderers and the murdered, wicked men and good-men-and-true float through the book's first section. Sue...

In 1888, Charles Colcock Jones Jr. published the first collection of folk narratives from the Gullah-speaking people of the South Atlantic coast, tales he heard black servants exchange on his family's rice and cotton plantation. It has been out of print and largely unavailable until now.

Jones saw the stories as a coastal variation of Joel Chandler Harris's inland dialect tales and sought to preserve their unique language and character. Through Jones' rendering of the sound and syntax of nineteenth-century Gullah, the lively stories describe the adventures and mishaps of such characters...

We travel the world, writes Gregory McNamee, and wherever we go there are snake stories to entertain us. Here are some fifty diverse and unusual accounts of serpents from cultures across time and around the globe: snakes that talk, jump, and dance; snakes that transform into other creatures; snakes that just . . . watch.

Many selections are drawn from the rich oral traditions of peoples in every clime that supports reptiles, from the Akimel O odham of North America to the Mensa Bet-Abrahe of Africa to the Mungkjan of Australia. Included as well are such writings as prayers from the...