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Cafe Indiana
A Guide to Indiana’s Down-Home Cafes
Joanne Raetz Stuttgen
University of Wisconsin Press, 2007
Cafe Indiana is both a guide to Indiana’s hometown mom-and-pop restaurants and a reclamation and celebration of small-town Midwest culture. The hungry diner looking for adventure and authenticity can use Cafe Indiana simply as a guide to the state’s quintessential eats: the best fiddlers, macaroni and cheese, soup beans, and beef Manhattan. But Stuttgen also captures the spirit of the locals, bringing to life the people whose stories give the book—and the food—its soul.
     Over plates of chicken and noodles, fried bologna sandwiches, and sugar cream pie, folks are crafting community at the Main Street eatery. In Cafe Indiana, Hoosiers and out-of-staters alike are invited to pull out a chair and sit a spell.
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Cemeteries Gravemarkers
Richard Meyer
Utah State University Press, 1992
Cemeteries house the dead, but gravemarkers are fashioned by the living, who record on them not only their pleasures, sorrows, and hopes for an afterlife, but also more than they realize of their history, ethnicity, and culture. Richard Meyer has gathered twelve original essays examining burial grounds through the centuries and across the land to give a broad understanding of the history and cultural values of communities, regions, and American society at large.
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Cheap Quick & Easy
Imitative Architectural Materials
Pamela H. Simpson
University of Tennessee Press, 1999
In this innovative study, Pamela H. Simpson examines the architectural materials that proliferated between 1870 and 1930. Produced by new technology, promoted by new forms of advertising, and eagerly adopted by a new middle class, these “cheap, quick, and easy” materials helped to transform building practices in the United States and Great Britain.

As Simpson shows in fascinating detail, rockface concrete blocks, pressed metal imitations of stone, linoleum “marble” and “parquet,” and embossed wall coverings made available to the masses a host of ornamental effects that only the wealthy could previously have afforded. But, she notes, wherever these new materials appeared, a heated debate over the appropriateness of imitation followed. Were these materials merely tasteless shams? Or were they economical, durable alternatives that democratically extended the possibilities of ornamentation?

Simpson devotes chapters to each of the various ornamental materials, considering its precursors, invention, production, and distribution. In her final chapter, she traces the history of the aesthetic debate over imitation and analyzes the social meaning of the materials. Far from being “bad taste,” she concludes, these new ornamental forms reflected modernism, democracy, and progress—some of the most deeply held values of the period.

The Author: Pamela H. Simpson is Ernest Williams II Professor of Art History at Washington and Lee University. The author of numerous articles and exhibition catalogs, she is co-author (with Royster Lyle) of The Architecture of Historic Lexington. She was president, for the 1997–99 term, of the Vernacular Architecture Forum.
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Children's Folklore
A Source Book
Brian Sutton-Smith, Jay Mechling, Thomas W. Johnson, and Felicia R. McMahon
Utah State University Press, 1999

A collection of orginal essays by scholars from a variety of fields-- includng American studies, folklore, anthropology, pyschology, sociology, and education---Children's Folklore: A Source Book moves beyond traditional social-science views of child development. It reveals the complexity and artistry of interactions among children, challenging stereotypes of simple childhood innocence and conventional explanations of development that privilege sober and sensible adult outcomes. Instead, the play and lore of children is shown to be often disruptive, wayward, and irrational.
 

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Children’s Literature and Old Norse Medievalism
David Clark
Arc Humanities Press, 2023
This book explores the ways in which contemporary authors respond to and rework key aspects of Old Norse history and viking culture for young twenty-first-century audiences. Why are contemporary authors and audiences so manifestly attracted to the viking past? In what ways do writers respond to Norse sources? How do the narratives they tell reflect our beliefs about and desires for the past, our constructions of childhood and adolescence, our anxieties around gender, sexuality, and ethnicity? How do these texts engage with a future occluded by apocalyptic ecological threat? David Clark explores these questions through readings of a rich body of diverse material which retells, updates, and transforms Norse culture. The volume contextualizes Norse medievalism and explores how thematic foci on gender, sexuality, disability, and ethnicity relate to contemporary concerns around these topics, and the construction of childhood.
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Cinderella
A Casebook
Alan Dundes
University of Wisconsin Press, 1988

Covering a period of more than one hundred years of work by renowned folklorists, these enlightening essays explore the timeless tale of Cinderella. In addition to the most famous versions of the story (Basile’s Pentamerone, Perrault’s Cendrillon, and the Grimm’s Aschenputtel), this casebook includes articles on other versions of the tale from Russian, English, Chinese, Greek and French folklore. The volume concludes with several interpretive essays, including a psychoanalytic view from Dundes and a critique of the popularization of Cinderella in America.

“Folklorists, scholars of children’s literature, and feminists should appreciate particularly the wide scope of this collection .  .  .  now in paperback with an updated Bibliographical Addendum. . . . Most helpful are the two-page introductions to each variant and to each essay which include a brief overview of the historical times as well as suggested additional sources for more discussion.”—Danny Rochman, Folklore Forum

“A milestone, a near complete source of primary and secondary materials.  .  .  .  The selected analytical writing include definitive classic and new discoveries, covering the whole range of methodological modes and theoretical perspectives from early forms and typology to myth-ritual, social-historical, anthropological, and psychoanalytical readings.  The annotated bibliography is most helpful, illuminating, and comprehensive, encompassing publications in other Western languages and works by Asianists.”—Chieko Mulhern, Asian Folklore Studies

“One can imagine several dimensions on which psychoanalysts might find such a collection interesting: as examples of applied psychoanalysis, in relation to philosophical and cultural examination of imaginative material, in relation to child development, and in the correlations between folktales of a particular culture and individual histories.”—Kerry Kelly Novick, Psychoanalytic Quarterly

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City of Neighborhoods
Memory, Folklore, and Ethnic Place in Boston
Anthony Bak Buccitelli
University of Wisconsin Press, 2016
East Boston has long been known as an Italian neighborhood and Southie as an Irish one, while nearby North Quincy has seen in recent decades an influx of Chinese Americans and immigrants. Such urban spaces in America can become intimately intertwined with ethnic identities (Little Italy, Greektown, Chinatown, Little Havana). Yet local residents often readily acknowledge an underlying diversity—both historically and as a result of more recent changes—that complicates such stereotypes.
            Digging into the ever-shifting terrain of American ethnicity and urban spaces, Anthony Bak Buccitelli investigates folk practices, social memory, and local histories in three Boston-area neighborhoods. He looks at the ways locals represent their neighborhoods and themselves via events, symbols, stories, and landmarks, from the shamrock to the Chinese flag, whether the St. Patrick’s Day parade in Southie or the Columbus Day parade in East Boston, from urban graffiti and websites to the Dorchester Heights Monument. City of Neighborhoods exposes the processes of selection and emphasis that produce, sustain, challenge, and change understandings of urban spaces as ethnic places.

Honorable mention, Wayland Hand Prize for Folklore and History, American Folklore Society
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Claiming Space
Performing the Personal through Decorated Mortarboards
Sheila Bock
Utah State University Press, 2023
Claiming Space examines the growing tradition of decorating mortarboards at college graduations, offering a performance-centered approach to these material sites of display. Taking mortarboard displays seriously as public performances of the personal, this book highlights the creative, playful, and powerful ways graduates use their caps to fashion their personal engagement with notions of self, community, education, and the unknown future.
 
Claiming the space of these graduation caps is a popular and widespread way that individuals make their voices heard, or rather seen, in the visual landscape of commencement ceremonies. The forms and meanings of these material displays take shape in relation to broader, ongoing conversations about higher education in the United States, conversations grounded in discourses of belonging, citizenship, and the promises of the American Dream. Integrating observational fieldwork with extensive interviews and surveys, author Sheila Bock highlights the interpretations of individuals participating in this tradition. She also attends to the public framings of this tradition, including how images of mortarboards have grounded online enactments of community through hashtags such as #LatinxGradCaps and #LetTheFeathersFly, as well as what rhetorical framings are employed in news coverage and legal documents in cases where the value of the practice is both called into question and justified.
 
As university administrators and cultural commentators seek to make sense of the current state of higher education, these forms of material expression offer insight into how students themselves are grappling with higher ed's promises and shortcomings. Claiming Space is a meaningful contribution to folklore, cultural studies, media studies, and education.
 
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Classic Readings on Monster Theory
Asa Simon Mittman
Arc Humanities Press, 2018
Companion volumes <i>Classic Readings on Monster Theory</i> and <i>Primary Sources on Monsters</i> gather a wide range of readings and sources to enable us to see and understand what monsters can show us about what it means to be human. The first volume introduces important modern theorists of the monstrous and aims to provide interpretive tools and strategies for students to use to grapple with the primary sources in the second volume, which brings together some of the most influential and indicative monster narratives from the West.
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Clever, Kind, Tricky, and Sly
A Bulgarian Folktale Sampler
Priscilla Howe
Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2020
Translations of forty-two Bulgarian folktales, together with introductory essay and notes for teachers and storytellers following each story, with a list of Resources Cited.
Each folktale expresses an aspect of Bulgarian folk culture, presents characters who are clever enough to avoid ill-conceived courtship, kind enough to esteem even the poorest of neighbors, tricky enough to evade shysters, or sly enough to remain independent in the face of great power. Each of these traits has helped the Bulgarian people survive and thrive in a relatively poor, mountainous environment for more than fourteen centuries. In celebrating these traits and others, the folktales collected here honor the character of a people.
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Clever Maids, Fearless Jacks, and a Cat
Fairy Tales from a Living Oral Tradition
Anita Best
Utah State University Press, 2019
Clever Maids, Fearless Jacks, and a Cat showcases the stories of two Newfoundland storytellers, Philip Pius Power and Alice Lannon. Ethnopoetic transcriptions of these sensitive and artful tales, which have been passed on orally for generations as part of a community tradition, give accounts of living oral performances from the last quarter of the twentieth century and demonstrate the artistry that is possible without the written word.
 
Here, eight tales from Power and five tales from Lannon take up issues of vital concern—such as spousal abuse, bullying, and social and generational conflict—allusively, through a screen of fiction. In commentary following the stories Anita Best, Martin Lovelace, and Pauline Greenhill discuss the transmission of fairy tales in oral tradition, address the relation of these magic tales to Lannon’s and Power’s other stories, and share specifics about Newfoundland storytelling and the two tellers themselves. The text is further enriched by expressive illustrations from artist Graham Blair.
 
Clever Maids, Fearless Jacks, and a Cat presents the fairy-tale oeuvres of two superb storytellers as a contribution to interdisciplinary fairy-tale studies and folklore—countering fairy-tale studies’ focus on written traditions and printed texts—as well as to gender studies, cultural studies, Newfoundland studies, and Canadian studies. Students, scholars, and general readers interested in folk and fairy tales, contemporary Märchen, Newfoundland folklore, or oral tradition more generally will find much of value in these pages.
 
Support for this publication was provided, in part, by the University of Winnipeg.
 
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Cloven Country
The Devil and the English Landscape
Jeremy Harte
Reaktion Books, 2023
Now in paperback, an exploration of the myths of England’s deceptively bucolic rolling hills and country lanes believed to be created and shaped by the Dark Lord himself.
 
According to legend, the English landscape—so calm on the surface—is really the Devil’s work. Cloven Country tells of rocks hurled into place and valleys carved out by infernal labor. The Devil’s hideous strength laid down great roads in one night and left scars everywhere as the hard stone melted like wax under those burning feet. With roots in medieval folklore of giants and spirits, this is not the Satan of prayer, but a clumsy ogre, easily fooled by humankind. When a smart cobbler or cunning young wife outwitted him, they struck a blow for the underdog. Only the wicked squire and grasping merchant were beyond redemption, carried off by a black huntsman in the storm. Cloven Country offers a fascinating panorama of these decidedly sinister English tales.
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The Cockfight
A Casebook
Edited by Alan Dundes
University of Wisconsin Press, 1994

Originating more than 2500 years ago, cockfighting is one of the oldest documented sports in the world.  It has continued to flourish despite bans against it in many countries.  In The Cockfight: A Casebook, folklorist Alan Dundes brings together a diverse array of writing on this male-dominated ritual.
    Vivid descriptions of cockfights from Puerto Rico, Tahiti, Ireland, Spain, Brazil, and the Philippines complement critical commentaries, from the fourth-century reflections of St. Augustine to contemporary anthropological and psychoanalytic interpretations.  The various essays discuss the intricate rules of the cockfight, the ethical question of pitting two equally matched roosters in a fight to the death, the emotional involvement of cockfighters and fans, and the sexual implications of the sport.  The result is an enlightening collection for anthropologists, folklorists, sociologists, and psychologists, as well as followers of this ancient blood sport.

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Collecting Music in the Aran Islands
A Century of History and Practice
Deirdre Ní Chonghaile
University of Wisconsin Press, 2022

For more than 150 years, individuals have traveled the countryside with pen, paper, tape recorders, and even video cameras to document versions of songs, music, and stories shared by communities. As technologies and methodologies have advanced, the task of gathering music has been taken up by a much broader group than scholars. The resulting collections created by these various people can be impacted by the individual collectors’ political and social concerns, cultural inclinations, and even simple happenstance, demonstrating a crucial yet underexplored relationship between the music and those preserving it.

Collecting Music in the Aran Islands, a critical historiographical study of the practice of documenting traditional music, is the first to focus on the archipelago off the west coast of Ireland. Deirdre Ní Chonghaile argues for a culturally equitable framework that considers negotiation, collaboration, canonization, and marginalization to fully understand the immensely important process of musical curation. In presenting four substantial, historically valuable collections from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, she illustrates how understanding the motivations and training (or lack thereof) of individual music collectors significantly informs how we should approach their work and contextualize their place in the folk music canon.

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The Complete Fables of Jean de La Fontaine
Jean de La Fontaine
University of Illinois Press, 2007
Inspired new translations of the work of one of the world's greatest fabulists

Told in an elegant style, Jean de la Fontaine's (1621-95) charming animal fables depict sly foxes and scheming cats, vain birds and greedy wolves, all of which subtly express his penetrating insights into French society and the beasts found in all of us. Norman R. Shapiro has been translating La Fontaine's fables for over twenty years, capturing the original work's lively mix of plain and archaic language. This newly complete translation is destined to set the English standard for this work.

Awarded the Lewis Galantière Prize by the American Translators Association, 2008.

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The Consolations of Humor and Other Folklore Essays
Elliott Oring
Utah State University Press, 2023
The Consolations of Humor and Other Folklore Essays unfolds as a series of questions, commentaries, and criticisms of the analysis, interpretation, and explanation of folklore. Can we confidently regard jokes as the catharsis of sexual and aggressive impulses? What is the basis for characterizing a joke as Jewish or Scottish or Japanese? What do we really know about “dirty jokes”? How is a text or behavior constructed so that it is perceived as humorous? Can we get a computer to reliably recognize jokes? What is the relevance of memetics and a Darwinian paradigm to understanding folklore change over time? Can we identify laws operating in the realm of folklore? How can the marginalization, extinction, or continuity of traditions be explained? In the course of addressing these questions, Elliott Oring identifies some fundamental problems, brings new evidence and observations to the discussion, and proffers some original and startling insights.

While recognizing the study of jokes and other forms of folklore as a humanistic endeavor, Oring believes in the relevance of a scientific perspective to the enterprise. He values clear definitions, tests of hypotheses and theories, empirical evidence, experiment, and the search for laws. Written in a sophisticated yet accessible style, The Consolations of Humor and Other Folklore Essays stimulates both scholars and students alike and contributes to the creation of a more robust folkloristics in the twenty-first century.
 
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The Cossack Hero in Russian Literature
A Study in Cultural Mythology
Judith Deutsch Kornblatt
University of Wisconsin Press, 1992

This is the first book to study the development of the Cossack hero and to identify him as part of Russian cultural mythology. Kornblatt explores the power of the myth as a literary image, providing new and challenging readings of Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoi, and a host of other writers.

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The Counselling Speeches of Jim Ka-Nipitehtew
Freda Ahenakew
University of Manitoba Press, 1998
A monolingual Cree speaker from Onion Lake, Saskatchewan, Jim Ka-Nipitehtew was a highly respected orator. His discourses have great force and authority, and no speeches of similar scope or depth have ever been published in their original form. He speaks of his concerns for young people, and of the proper performances of rituals, and gives an account of the signing of Treaty Six. These are superb examples of authentic spoken Cree texts. They are presented in syllabics, with Roman orthography and English translation on facing pages, and a glossary.
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Counting-Out Rhymes
A Dictionary
Edited by Roger D. Abrahams and Lois Rankin
University of Texas Press, 1980

Eeny, meeny, figgledy, fig.
Delia, dolia, dominig,
Ozy, pozy doma-nozy,
Tee, tau, tut,
Uggeldy, buggedy, boo!
Out goes you. (no. 129)

You can stand,
And you can sit,
But, if you play,
You must be it. (no. 577)

Counting-out rhymes are used by children between the ages of six and eleven as a special way of choosing it and beginning play. They may be short and simple ("O-U-T spells out/And out goes you") or relatively long and complicated; they may be composed of ordinary words, arrant nonsense, or a mixture of the two.

Roger D. Abrahams and Lois Rankin have gathered together a definitive compendium of counting-out rhymes in English reported to 1980. These they discovered in over two hundred sources from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including rhymes from England, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. Representative texts are given for 582 separate rhymes, with a comprehensive listing of sources and variants for each one, as well as information on each rhyme's provenience, date, and use. Cross-references are provided for variants whose first lines differ from those of the representative texts. Abrahams's introduction discusses the significance of counting-out rhymes in children's play.

Children's folklore and speech play have attracted increasing attention in recent years. Counting-Out Rhymes will be a valuable resource for researchers in this field.

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Cowboy Poets and Cowboy Poetry
Edited by David Stanley and Elaine Thatcher
University of Illinois Press, 2000
In bunkhouses or rodeo arenas, on the trail or around the campfire, cowboys have been creating and reciting poetry since the 1870s. In this comprehensive overview, folklorists, scholars, and cowboy poets join forces to explore the 125-year history and development of cowboy poetry and to celebrate those who sustain it.
 
Centered around six areas of focus, from historical background to biographical profiles to creative process, Cowboy Poets and Cowboy Poetry approaches the tradition of occupational folk poetry from a variety of perspectives. Contributors trace its history as an extension of the Homeric tradition of storytelling in verse and discuss such topics as the way a text evolves in retelling, how it becomes linked to a tune, and how poetic content fuses with form to generate narrative tension and humor.
 
Personal and telling portraits of cowboy poets and reciters--including D. J. O'Malley, Henry Herbert Knibbs, and a number of contemporary cowboy poets--illuminate the creative process through which individual poets work within a long community tradition, while comparative studies examine poetry by women, Mexican-American vaqueros, loggers, Argentine gauchos, and Australian bush poets.
 
Cowboy Poets and Cowboy Poetry offers the first in-depth examination of a distinctive and community-based tradition rich with larger-than-life heroes, vivid occupational language, humor, and unblinking encounters with birth, death, nature, and animals. Throughout, the collection shows that cowboy poetry interweaves two thematic strands: a fierce defense of an endangered way of life and a dynamic celebration of organic wholeness, camaraderie, and individualism.
 
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Creativity And Tradition
Simon Bronner
Utah State University Press, 1992

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Cree Legends and Narratives from the West Coast of James Bay
Simeon Scott
University of Manitoba Press, 1995
This is the first major body of annotated texts in James Bay Cree, and a unique documentation of Swampy and Moose Cree (Western James Bay) usage of the 1950s and 1960s. Conversations and interviews with 16 different speakers include: legends, reminiscences, historical narratives, stories and conversations, as well as descriptions of technology. The book includes a detailed pronunciation guide, notes on Cree terms, informants' comments, dialect variations, and descriptions of cultural values and customs. The introduction describes and compares the various genres in traditional and popular culture. Cree and English, with full glosssary.
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Culture Work
Folklore for the Public Good
Tim Frandy and B. Marcus Cederström
University of Wisconsin Press, 2022
How do culture workers construct public arts and culture projects that are effective and transformative? How do we create public humanities projects of the community, for the community, and with the community? How can culture work make a concrete difference in the quality of life for communities, and lead to the creation of a more just world? Why do the public humanities matter? Culture Work explores these questions through real-world examples of cultural and public humanities projects. The innovative case studies analyzed in the book demonstrate the vast numbers of creative possibilities in culture work today—in all their complexities, challenges, and potentialities.
 
Thematically arranged chapters embody the interconnected aspects of culture work, from amplifying local voices to galvanizing community from within, from preservation of cultural knowledge to its creative repurposing for a desired future. These inventive projects provide concrete examples and accessible theory grounded in practice, encourage readers to embark on their own public culture work, and create new forward-looking inspiration for community leaders and scholars in the field.
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The Cultures of Celebrations
Edited by Ray B. Browne and Michael T. Marsden
University of Wisconsin Press, 1994
    Popular entertainments are windows into the attitudes and values of the people who participate in them. They both reflect and affect society as they celebrate an aspect of life. The fifteen essays in this collection demonstrate various aspects of celebrations of cultures and the importance they have in those cultures.
    Topics include: feminine processions and masculine parades; political activism and quietism in Shi’a rituals; civic socializing in Puritan New England; the circus and American culture; the Wild West shows; beauty pageants; theme parks; Bourbon Street, New Orleans; and Stonehenge.
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