logo for University of Illinois Press
Tales and Sketches, vol. 1
1831-1842
Edgar Allan Poe
University of Illinois Press, 1978
Esteemed as a literary critic and poet, Edgar Allan Poe was most highly acclaimed for his tales and sketches. He transformed the short story from anecdote to art, virtually created the detective story, and perfected the psychological thriller. This volume is the first of two, edited by the consummate Poe scholar Thomas Ollive Mabbott, collecting all the tales of this master of the uncanny, the unnerving, and the terrifying.
 
Poe's stories reflect his professed method of "writing as if the author were firmly impressed with the truth, yet astonished at the immensity of the wonders he related." Marrying grotesque inventiveness with superb plot construction, Poe's strikingly original tales often use only one main character and one main incident. In many of them, horror and suspense, revenge and torture, are laced with hilarious satire. Each volume is enriched with Mabbott's detailed and authoritative notes on sources, the history and collation of all known texts authorized by Poe, and variants of Poe's "final" version.
 
Volume 1 includes Poe's earliest parodies, beginning in 1831, and gathers his gothic tales written through 1842. The stories collected in this volume include "Ms. Found in a Bottle," the horrific "Berenice," "Ligeia" (which Poe considered his finest tale), "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," and one of his most famous stories, "The Fall of the House of Usher."
 
Promising spine-tingling delights and sleepless nights, this annotated edition of Tales and Sketches is a treasure trove for scholars and general readers alike, confirming Poe's status as one of literary art's "most brilliant but erratic stars."
 
[more]

logo for University of Illinois Press
Tales and Sketches, vol. 2
1843-1849
Edgar Allan Poe
University of Illinois Press, 1978
Esteemed as a literary critic and poet, Edgar Allan Poe was most highly acclaimed for his tales and sketches. He transformed the short story from anecdote to art, virtually created the detective story, and perfected the psychological thriller. This volume is the second of two, edited by the consummate Poe scholar Thomas Ollive Mabbott, collecting all the tales of this master of the uncanny, the unnerving, and the terrifying.
 
Poe's stories reflect his professed method of "writing as if the author were firmly impressed with the truth, yet astonished at the immensity of the wonders he related." Marrying grotesque inventiveness with superb plot construction, Poe's strikingly original tales often use only one main character and one main incident. In many of them, horror and suspense, revenge and torture, are laced with hilarious satire. Each volume is enriched with Mabbott's detailed and authoritative notes on sources, the history and collation of all known texts authorized by Poe, and variants of Poe's "final" version.
 
Volume 2 contains stories written between 1843 and Poe's death, including "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Purloined Letter," and "The Cask of Amontillado."
 
Promising spine-tingling delights and sleepless nights, this annotated edition of Tales and Sketches is a treasure trove for scholars and general readers alike, confirming Poe's status as one of literary art's "most brilliant but erratic stars."
 
 
 
[more]

front cover of Tales and Songs of Southern Illinois
Tales and Songs of Southern Illinois
Collected by Charles Neely
Southern Illinois University Press, 1998

First published in 1938, this lively collection of over 150 tales and songs runs the gamut from joy to woe, from horror to humor. In forming the collection, Charles Neely required only that the tales and songs—whether home grown or transplanted from the great body of world lore— had taken root somehow in the area of southern Illinois known as Egypt.

Notable tales include "Bones in the Well," "A Visit from Jesse James," "The Flight of the Naked Teamsters," "The Dug Hill Boger," and "How Death Came to Ireland"; among the songs and ballads are "Barbara Allen," "Hog and Hominy," "The Drunkard’s Lone Child," "The Belleville Convent Fire," "Shawneetown Flood," and "The Death of Charlie Burger."

[more]

front cover of Tales and Towns of Northern New Jersey
Tales and Towns of Northern New Jersey
Beck, Henry
Rutgers University Press, 1967
Long regarded as folklife classics, Henry Charlton Beck's books are vivid recreations of the back roads, small towns, and legends that give New Jersey its special character. Rutgers University Press is pleased to make these important books available again in newly designed editions.
[more]

front cover of Tales and Trails of Illinois
Tales and Trails of Illinois
Stu Fliege
University of Illinois Press, 2002
Based on a collection of fifty-two vignettes of Illinois history originally published as weekly columns in newspapers and revised for publication in book form, Tales and Trails of Illinois presents little-known episodes and adds perspective to tales of the state’s varied past. Pairing readable commentary with striking description and detail, the book is a useful compendium of Illinois heritage in an accessible and entertaining format.
Stu Fliege highlights historical events, such as the Herrin Massacre and Chicago’s Iroquois Theatre fire, and covers the diverse terrain of Illinois’s natural and constructed wonders, from Lusk Creek Canyon to Robert Allerton Park. Readers will meet a colorful cast of characters including pioneers, squatters, miners, gangsters, and utopian leaders. They’ll travel back in time to when salt production was the state’s main industry and learn of the Illinois ingenuity that spawned inventions including barbed wire, the steel plow, and the Ferris wheel. From Oquawka’s elephant memorial to Murphysboro’s mysterious mud monster, the book also offers quirky facts and spooky stories that aren’t found in the average history book.
Liberally illustrated and clearly written, Tales and Trails of Illinois is a helpful learning tool for Illinoisans of all ages, perfect for families, history buffs, libraries, and the classroom.
 
[more]

front cover of Tales and Trials of Love, Concerning Venus’s Punishment of Those Who Scorn True Love and Denounce Cupid’s Sovereignty
Tales and Trials of Love, Concerning Venus’s Punishment of Those Who Scorn True Love and Denounce Cupid’s Sovereignty
A Bilingual Edition and Study
Jeanne Flore
Iter Press, 2014
Kelly Peebles’s excellent translation and edition of Jeanne Flore’s Comptes amoureux / Tales and Trials of Love (Lyon, 1542) puts Flore back on the map of important French female authors, both for English-speaking readers and for scholars interested more broadly in early modern French print culture. The transcription of the French text, complete with bibliographic details from the first edition, pairs beautifully with Peebles’s dynamic and engaging translation. Peebles’s introduction elegantly shows how Flore’s text stands as a significant textual and material representative of one of the most artistically rich and culturally tumultuous times in early modern France. Her edition and translation will no doubt become a principal reference for future scholarly work not only on Jeanne Flore, but also on female authorship, gender, and print culture in early modern France and Europe.
[more]

front cover of Tales from a Free-Range Childhood
Tales from a Free-Range Childhood
Donald Davis
Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2022
A cycle of twenty stories, each of which is focused on childhood friends, the antics of his neighborhood and school chums, and the mysteries of adult life seen through a child’s unerring eye.
[more]

front cover of Tales from an Uncertain World
Tales from an Uncertain World
What Other Assorted Disasters Can Teach Us About Climate Change
L. S. Gardiner
University of Iowa Press, 2018

So far, humanity hasn’t done very well in addressing the ongoing climate catastrophe. Veteran science educator L. S. Gardiner believes we can learn to do better by understanding how we’ve dealt with other types of environmental risks in the past and why we are dragging our feet in addressing this most urgent emergency. Weaving scientific facts and research together with humor and emotion, Gardiner explores human responses to erosion, earthquakes, fires, invasive species, marine degradation, volcanic eruptions, and floods in order to illuminate why we find it so challenging to deal with climate change. Insight emerges from unexpected places—a mermaid exhibit, a Magic 8 Ball, and midcentury cartoons about a future that never came to be. 

Instead of focusing on the economics and geopolitics of the debate over climate change, this book brings large-scale disaster to a human scale, emphasizing the role of the individual. We humans do have the capacity to deal with disasters. When we face threatening changes, we don’t just stand there pretending it isn’t so, we do something. But because we’re human, our responses aren’t always the right ones the first time—yet we can learn to do better. This book is essential reading for all who want to know how we can draw on our strengths to survive the climate catastrophe and forge a new relationship with nature. 

[more]

front cover of Tales From Jackpine Bob
Tales From Jackpine Bob
Bob Cary
University of Minnesota Press, 2003

Bob Cary’s entertaining stories of life in the outdoors will touch your heart and make you laugh. Despite Bob’s many years as an expert woodsman, when he relates an adventure or a misadventure, the joke is always on him. Whether you read Tales from Jackpine Bob by firelight or lamplight, you’ll enjoy Bob’s warm humor and buoyant spirit. 


 
[more]

front cover of Tales from la Vida
Tales from la Vida
A Latinx Comics Anthology
Frederick L Aldama
The Ohio State University Press, 2018

In the Latinx comics community, there is much to celebrate today, with more Latinx comic book artists than ever before. The resplendent visual-verbal storyworlds of these artists reach into and radically transform so many visual and storytelling genres. Tales from la Vida celebrates this space by bringing together more than eighty contributions by extraordinary Latinx creators. Their short visual-verbal narratives spring from autobiographical experience as situated within the language, culture, and history that inform Latinx identity and life. Tales from la Vida showcases the huge variety of styles and worldviews of today’s Latinx comic book and visual creators. 

Whether it’s detailing the complexities of growing up—mono- or multilingual, bicultural, straight, queer, or feminist Latinx—or focusing on aspects of pop culture, these graphic vignettes demonstrate the expansive complexity of Latinx identities. Taken individually and together, these creators—including such legendary artists as Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez, Roberta Gregory, and Kat Fajardo, to name a few—and their works show the world that when it comes to Latinx comics, there are no limits to matters of content and form. As we travel from one story to the next and experience the unique ways that each creator chooses to craft his or her story, our hearts and minds wake to the complex ways that Latinxs live within and actively transform the world.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Tales from Luristan
Sekandar Amanolahi
Harvard University Press, 1986
Little is known of the Luri dialect of Khurramabad, but Professor Amanolahi of Shiraz University has collected various stories from his native town in the local language. Together with Wheeler Thackston of Harvard he has prepared a compact volume covering the tales in transcription, translations into English, a short grammatical sketch, and a Luri-English vocabulary (Luristan is a province of western Iran in the Zagros Mountains). The traditional grammatical analysis of the dialect is easy to follow and the translations of both poetry and prose closely follow the original, a tribute to the close collaboration of the two scholars. This unique volume will be of great interest to students of the folklore, linguistics, and customs of the inhabitants of the center of Luristan.
[more]

front cover of Tales from the Basotho
Tales from the Basotho
By Minnie Postma
University of Texas Press, 1974

"They say that the eldest of the chief's daughters..." So begins a tale from the Basotho, unfolded by the meager light of a dung fire that burns smokily behind the reed screen sheltering the entrance of the hut. The old ones of the tribe wait until dark before telling their stories, for everyone knows horns will grow from the head of one who tells a story during daylight hours. Tales from the Basotho abounds with elements familiar to folk narrative. The heroes and heroines are the chiefs and their wives, their sons and their daughters. Fantastic creatures frequent the narratives. exhibiting their awful powers.

Rustic peace and beauty pervade the stories, as Minnie Postma amply demonstrates in her versions of the tales. Something fearful may be occurring—the dreaded Koeoko pulling the only son of the chief under water—but, at the same time, girls with babies tied to their backs are searching for edible bulbs in the veld, and an old woman dreams in the gentle sunlight in front of the huts.

These tales from the Basotho are for entertainment only. There is a tabu against telling tales while the sun shines, because daylight hours must be saved for work. The telling itself is the· reason the story exists, for the audience is already aware of the outcome of each tale. As Wm. Hugh Jansen emphasizes in his foreword, "text" and "context" are often easily interpreted and made accessible in a translation, but Tales from the Basotho is ultimately successful for its rendering of "texture." And texture is doubly hard to convey when the telling itself is of primary importance. Minnie Postma and Susie McDermid have transferred the art of the Basotho raconteur onto the printed page. All the simple, understandable formulas, exclamations, and repetitions used so skillfully by the native storyteller are present. Rhythm is an important element in the tales, and a word, a phrase, even a whole paragraph will be repeated until the rhythm satisfies the storyteller, in tum increasing the appreciation of the listeners.

[more]

front cover of Tales from the Big Thicket
Tales from the Big Thicket
Francis Edward Abernethy
University of North Texas Press, 2002
Abernethy presents the history and folklore of the Big Thicket and its people, including a collection of Alabama-Coushatta tales, a search for hidden Jayhawkers during the Civil War, a nineteenth-century travel account, and a family history of the legendary Hooks.
[more]

front cover of Tales from the Kingdom of Lailonia and The Key to Heaven
Tales from the Kingdom of Lailonia and The Key to Heaven
Leszek Kolakowski
University of Chicago Press, 1989
This volume contains two unusual and appealing satirical works by the well-known European philosopher Kolakowski. The first, Tales from the Kingdom of Lailonia, is set in a fictional land. Each story illustrates some aspect of human inability to come to terms with imperfection, infinitude, history, and nature. The second, The Key to Heaven, is a collection of seventeen biblical tales from the Old Testament told in such a way that the story and the moral play off each other to illustrate political, moral, or existential foibles and follies.
[more]

front cover of Tales from the Prince of Storytellers
Tales from the Prince of Storytellers
Robert Louis Stevenson
Northwestern University Press, 1993
Robert Louis Stevenson is widely known for his novels Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Treasure Island, and Kidnapped. His reputation as a "romantic" writer and children's author, however, reflects only a portion of his literary achievement. This collection of stories features an introduction by Stevenson scholar Barry Menikoff which places Stevenson's writing in a new context. Menikoff argues that Stevenson is misunderstood by academic readers and critics and presents him as a writer whose subjects and methods are clearly modernist.

Included in this volume for the first time are versions of the stories "Markheim" and "The Isle of Voices" as they appear in Stevenson' s holograph manuscripts, plus his classics The Suicide Club, The Rajah's Diamond, "The Bottle Imp," "The Pavilion on the Links," "A Lodging for the Night," "The Merry Men," and "Thrawn Janet."
[more]

front cover of Tales of a Low-Rent Birder
Tales of a Low-Rent Birder
By Pete Dunne
University of Texas Press, 1994
Tales of a Low-Rent Birder is a collection of nineteen essays and sketches written between 1977 and 1985. It was originally published in 1986.
[more]

front cover of Tales of a Minstrel of Reims in the Thirteenth Century
Tales of a Minstrel of Reims in the Thirteenth Century
Samuel N. Rosenberg
Catholic University of America Press, 2021
An anonymous minstrel in thirteenth-century France composed this gripping account of historical events in his time. Crusaders and Muslim forces battle for control of the Holy Land, while power struggles rage between and among religious authorities and their conflicting secular counterparts, pope and German emperor, the kings of England and the kings of France. Meanwhile, the kings cannot count on their independent-minded barons to support or even tolerate the royal ambitions. Although politics (and the collapse of a royal marriage) frame the narrative, the logistics of war are also in play: competing military machinery and the challenges of transporting troops and matariel. Inevitably, the civilian population suffers. The minstrel was a professional story-teller, and his livelihood likely depended on his ability to captivate an audience. Beyond would-be objective reporting, the minstrel dramatizes events through dialogue, while he delves into the motives and intentions of important figures, and imparts traditional moral guidance. We follow the deeds of many prominent women and witness striking episodes in the lives of Eleanor of Aquitaine, Richard the Lionhearted, Blanche of Castile, Frederick the Great, Saladin, and others. These tales survive in several manuscripts, suggesting that they enjoyed significant success and popularity in their day. Samuel N. Rosenberg produced this first scholarly translation of the Old French tales into English. References that might have been obvious to the minstrel’s original audience are explained for the modern reader in the indispensable annotations of medieval historian Randall Todd Pippenger. The introduction by eminent medievalist William Chester Jordan places the minstrel’s work in historical context and discusses the surviving manuscript sources.
[more]

front cover of Tales of an American Hobo
Tales of an American Hobo
Charles Elmer Fox
University of Iowa Press, 1989

"Reefer Charlie" Fox rode the rails from 1928 to 1939; from 1939 to 1965 he hitched rides in automobiles and traveled by foot. From Indiana to British Columbia, from Arkansas to Texas, from Utah to Mexico, he was part of the grand hobo tradition that has all but passed away from American life.

He camped in hobo jungles, slept under bridges and in sand houses at railroad yards, ate rattlesnake meat, fresh California grapes, and fish speared by the Indians of the Northwest. He quickly learned both the beauty and the dangers of his chosen way of life. One lesson learned early on was that there are distinct differences among hoboes, tramps, and bums. As the all-time king of hoboes, Jeff Davis, used to say, "Hoboes will work, tramps won't, and bums can't."

Tales of an American Hobo is a lasting legacy to conventional society, teaching about a bygone era of American history and a rare breed of humanity who chose to live by the rails and on the road.

[more]

front cover of Tales of an Eastern Port
Tales of an Eastern Port
The Singapore Novellas of Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad
National University of Singapore Press, 2023
Singapore in the writings of Joseph Conrad: a node in the networks of colonial modernity.

In the 1880s, Joseph Conrad spent three extended stints in the colonial port city of Singapore, while working on ships around the region. Over the next thirty years, he would return to this place many times in his writing. Singapore is the principal, if sometimes obscured, port of call in Conrad’s fiction; it is the center of overlapping networks, colonial and commercial, religious and literary. His characters travel to upriver Borneo and to Bangkok, to Shanghai and to Sydney, and yet they tend to return to Singapore. 

This volume pairs for the first time two Conrad novellas that start in Singapore: The End of the Tether and The Shadow-Line.Together they provide a fleeting portrait of the developing city, through narrators who are uneasy with the trappings and workings of the colonial enterprise. These stories have renewed relevance as part of global modernist and oceanic literatures, and reading them now helps recall one chapter in Singapore’s long history as a vital site of cultural exchange, one that harbors and inspires distinctive storytelling traditions.
 
[more]

front cover of Tales of an Old Horsetrader
Tales of an Old Horsetrader
The First Hundred Years
Leroy Judson Daniels
University of Iowa Press, 1987

Leroy Daniels was born in 1882 near Adair, Iowa. When he was ten, his father gave him a pony and a checkbook and sent him out to buy cattle. By the time he was sixteen, he was alone on a ranch in Montana with a herd of seventy wild horses to break. At twenty-one, he was trading horses in the Chicago stockyards, where he told Henry Ford that a horse was better than a car any day. At one hundred, he retired to tell his memoirs.

The years in between are well worth reading about. Lee Daniels followed a plow all day long, worked coal to make ends meet, raised and traded and sold all manner of four-legged stock. But horses were always part of his life. Daniels traded them in Chicago for decades, sold them to Italy, England, France, and Belgium during World War I, inspected them for the army once the U.S. joined the Allies, bought them for eighty dollars in the morning and sold them for thousands by noon. He handled show horses, work horses, and trick horses, traveled the country over to fill his show barn with the best of them, befriended, understood, and loved them.

These pages tell the tale of a unique and vigorous American whose every word reveals his love of this land and its animals. If you weren't lucky enough to live like Lee Daniels, reading about his life is the next best thing.

[more]

front cover of Tales of Ancient India
Tales of Ancient India
Edited by J. A. B. van Buitenen
University of Chicago Press, 1969
"This admirably produced and well-translated volume of stories from the Sanskrit takes the Western reader into one of the Golden Ages of India. . . . The world in which the tales are set is one which placed a premium upon slickness and guile as aids to success. . . . Merchants, aristocrats, Brahmins, thieves and courtesans mingle with vampires, demi-gods and the hierarchy of heaven in a series of lively or passionate adventures. The sources of the individual stories are clearly indicated; the whole treatment is scholarly without being arid."—The Times Literary Supplement

"Fourteen tales from India, newly translated with a terse and vibrant effectiveness. These tales will appeal to any reader who enjoys action, suspense, characterization, and suspension of disbelief in the supernatural."—The Personalist
[more]

front cover of Tales of Canyonlands Cowboys
Tales of Canyonlands Cowboys
Richard Negri
Utah State University Press, 1997

Richard Negri interviews cattlemen and women about ranching in the rugged canyonlands region of southeastern Utah. Personal stories and anecdotes from the colorful characters who ground out a hard living on ranches of the are in the early twentieth century.

[more]

front cover of Tales of Dionysus
Tales of Dionysus
The Dionysiaca of Nonnus of Panopolis
Edited by William Levitan and Stanley Lombardo
University of Michigan Press, 2022

Tales of Dionysus is the first English verse translation of one of the most extraordinary poems of the Greek literary tradition, the Dionysiaca of Nonnus of Panopolis. By any standard, the Dionysiaca is a formidable work. It is by far the longest poem surviving from the classical world, a massive mythological epic stretching to over 20,000 lines, written in the tradition of Homer, using Homer’s verse, Homer’s language, his narrative turns and motifs, and invoking his ancient Muses. But it is also the last ancient epic to follow a Homeric model, composed so late in fact that it stands as close in time to the Renaissance as it does to archaic Greece. Like its titular hero, Dionysus, with his fluidity of forms, names, and divine incarnations, the poem itself is continually shifting shape. Out of its formal epic frame spills a tumult of ancient literary types: tragedy, elegy, didactic, panegyric, pastoral idyll, and the novel are all parts of this gigantic enterprise, each genre coming to the fore one after the other.

Tales of Dionysus brings together forty-two translators from a wide range of backgrounds, with different experiences and different potential relationships to the text of Nonnus’ poem. All work in their own styles and with their own individual approaches to the poem, to translation, and to poetic form. This variety turns Tales of Dionysus into a showcase of the multiple possibilities open to classical translation in the contemporary world.

[more]

front cover of Tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann
Tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann
E. T. A. Hoffmann
University of Chicago Press, 1972
Ranging from macabre fantasies to fairy tales and tales of crime, these stories from the author of The Nutcracker create a rich fictional world. Hoffman paints a complex vision of humanity, where people struggle to establish identities in a hostile, absurd world.

"The editors have made an excellent selection, and the result is a book of great distinction."—Denis Donoghue, New York Review of Books

"The translators have proved fully equal to all the challenges of Hoffmann's romantic irony and his richly allusive prose, giving us an accurate and idiomatic rendering that also retains much of the original flavor."—Harry Zohn, Saturday Review
[more]

front cover of Tales of Forgotten Chicago
Tales of Forgotten Chicago
Richard C. Lindberg
Southern Illinois University Press, 2020
Hidden gems from Chicago’s past

Tales of Forgotten Chicago contains twenty-one fascinating, little-known stories about a great city and its people. Richard C. Lindberg has dug deeply to reveal lost historical events and hidden gems from Chicago’s past.  

Spanning the Civil War through the 1960s, the volume showcases forgotten crimes, punishments, and consequences: poisoned soup that nearly killed three hundred leading citizens, politicians, and business and religious leaders; a woman in showbiz and her street-thug husband whose checkered lives inspired a 1955 James Cagney movie; and the first police woman in Chicago, hired as a result of the senseless killing of a young factory girl in a racially tinged case of the 1880s.

Also included are tales of industry and invention, such as America’s first automobile race, the haunting of a wealthy Gilded Age manufacturer’s mansion, and the identity of the telephone’s rightful inventor. Chapters on the history of early city landmarks spotlight the fight to save Lakefront Park and how “Lucky” Charlie Weeghman’s north side baseball park became Wrigley Field. Other chapters explore civic, cultural, and political happenings: the great Railroad Fairs of 1948 and 1949; Richard J. Daley’s revival of the St. Patrick’s Day parade; political disrupter Lar “America First” Daly; and the founding of the Special Olympics in Chicago by Anne Burke and others. Finally, some are just wonderful tales, such asa  touching story about the sinking of Chicago's beloved Christmas tree ship.

Engrossing and imaginative, this collection opens new windows into the past of the Windy City.
 
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Tales of Heichu
Susan Downing Videen
Harvard University Press, 1989

For a thousand years Heichū has appeared and reappeared in Japanese literature, always a grand but fickle lover, and usually a hapless one. One of the earliest references to him, an allusion in The Tale of Genji to his having blackened his face inadvertently with ink, reflects the comic strand that has run through stories of his career from the beginning. Yet the eleventh-century Heichū monogatari in the uta monogatari form provides narrative occasions for 153 poems of great beauty and force. In this earliest version, Heichū is romantic, pensive, touched as much by pathos as by humor.

In Heichū Monogatari and the Heichū Legend, Susan Downing Videen translates the Heian Tale of Heichū, traces the legend from its origins in the life of the court poet Taira no Sadafun through many literary developments over the centuries, and discusses successive versions critically with translations of relevant episodes and tales.

[more]

front cover of Tales of Love, Cleverness, and Violence in Tomaso Costo’s
Tales of Love, Cleverness, and Violence in Tomaso Costo’s "Fuggilozio" (1596)
Translated into English
Tommaso Astarita
Arc Humanities Press, 2024
This selection from Tomaso Costo’s Fuggilozio (The Cure for Indolence, 1596) translates entertaining, dramatic, or witty examples of the over four hundred stories and anecdotes of the original. Together, they offer an engaging window into the lively culture and society of Naples and Italy generally. Though the story-tellers are all from the city’s elite, the characters in the stories they tell run the social and professional gamut, from peasants to emperors, and the variety and brevity of the tales offers something for all readers who can smile at human foibles, silliness, and naughtiness, and admire cleverness and guile. Costo, in spite of his introductory claim that the book is meant to guide its audience to virtue and away from vice, also at times indulges in blunt innuendos and jokes that can still surprise us today.
[more]

front cover of Tales of Old-Time Texas
Tales of Old-Time Texas
By J. Frank Dobie
University of Texas Press, 1955

It is for good reason that J. Frank Dobie is known as the Southwest's master storyteller. With his eye for color and detail, his ear for the rhythm of language and song, and his heart open to the simple truth of folk wisdom and ways, he movingly and unpretentiously spins the tales of our collective heritages. This he does in Tales of Old-Time Texas, a heartwarming array of twenty-eight stories filled with vivid characters, exciting historical episodes, and traditional themes. As Dobie himself says: "Any tale belongs to whoever can best tell it." Here, then, is a collection of the best Texas tales—by the Texan who can best tell them.

Dobie's recollections include such classics in Lone Star State lore as the tale of Jim Bowie's knife, the legend of the Texas bluebonnet, the story of the Wild Woman of the Navidad, and the account of the headless horseman of the mustangs. Other stories in this outstanding collection regale us with odd and interesting characters and events: the stranger of Sabine Pass, the Apache secret of the Guadalupes, the planter who gambled away his bride, and the Robinhooding of Sam Bass. These stories, and many more, make Tales of Old-Time Texas a beloved classic certain to endure for generations.

[more]

logo for Ohio University Press
The Tales Of Prince Samuttakote
A Buddhist Epic from Thailand
Thomas John Hudak
Ohio University Press, 1993
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Thai poets produced epics depicting elaborate myths and legends which intermingled the human, natural, and supernatural worlds. One of the most famous of these classical compositions is the Samuttakhoot kham chan, presented here in English for the first time as The Tale of Prince Samuttakote. The work of three poets, it was begun during the reign of King Naray (1656-1688) and was completed in 1849 by the patriarch-prince Paramanuchit Chinorot (1790-1853).

Translated with enchanting poetic imagery, the poem relates the adventures of Prince Samuttakote and his princess as they tour the heavenly realms with a magic sword. The two are separated after the sword is stolen but are reunited after further adventures. Upon ascending the throne, they teach the moral code of precepts and how all life is affected by it. The poem is important for its depiction of the amusements and daily life of seventeenth-century Thailand and for its use of classic Thai poetic devices.
[more]

front cover of Tales of South Jersey
Tales of South Jersey
Profiles and Personalities
Waltzer, Jim
Rutgers University Press, 2001

There's much more to southern New Jersey than the Pine Barrens and the Jersey Devil, and this collection by journalists Jim Waltzer and Tom Wilk tells readers all about it. Oceanside and bayside towns offer a box seat from which to observe the regions rich history and the summery lore of the wonders of nature. Landlocked towns boast their own homespun and hell-raising traditions and idiosyncrasies.

Waltzer and Wilk have compiled almost fifty stories about the state's southernmost counties. Although the focus is on Atlantic City and its remarkable people, outsize structures, and quirky events, the storytelling ranges across the wider region to provide an insiders look at history as it was being made. You'll encounter gangsters and gamblers, baseball hitters and hurricanes, famous piers and hotels, landmark theaters and eateries, splashy events and unheralded oddities ¾ in sum, a cross-section of the regions character and characters.

The authors divide their book into six sections: entertainment, famous and infamous events, innovations and innovators, leisure and recreation, room and board, and sports legends. Within each section are the rich and varied stories Waltzer and Wilk have collected for New Jerseyans reading pleasure.

[more]

front cover of Tales of Southeast Asia’s Jazz Age
Tales of Southeast Asia’s Jazz Age
Filipinos, Indonesians and Popular Culture, 1920-1936
Peter Keppy
National University of Singapore Press, 2019
Luis Borromeo was the Philippines’s “King of Jazz,” who at the height of his popularity created a Filipino answer to the Ziegfeld Follies. Miss Riboet was a world-famous Javanese opera singer who ruled the theater world. While each represented a unique corner of the entertainment world, the rise and fall of these two superstar figures tell an important story of Southeast Asia’s 1920s Jazz Age.
This artistic era was marked by experimentation and adaption, and this was reflected in both Borromeo’s and Riboet’s styles. They were pioneering cultural brokers who dealt in hybrids. They were adept at combining high art and banal entertainment, tradition and modernity, and the foreign and the local.
Leaning on cultural studies and the work on cosmopolitanism and modernity by Henry Jenkins and Joel Kahn, Peter Keppy examines pop culture at this time as a contradictory social phenomenon. He challenges notions of Southeast Asia’s popular culture as lowbrow entertainment created by elites and commerce to manipulate the masses, arguing instead that audiences seized on this popular culture to channel emancipatory activities, to articulate social critique, and to propagate an inclusive nationalism without being radically anticolonial.
[more]

front cover of Tales of Texas Cooking
Tales of Texas Cooking
Stories and Recipes from the Trans Pecos to the Piney Woods and High Plains to the Gulf Prairies
Frances Brannen Vick
University of North Texas Press, 2015

front cover of Tales of the Earth
Tales of the Earth
Native North American Creation Mythology
David Leeming
Reaktion Books, 2021
A revealing analysis of key themes in Native American origin myths—and their stark contrast with the exceptionalist values of the United States.
 
Tales of the Earth is a comprehensive yet concise overview of Native American mythologies. After outlining theories of the origins of Native North Americans, David Leeming considers the creation myths of many tribes, emphasizing four commonly occurring figures: the Great Spirit, the trickster, the goddess, and the hero. Leeming suggests that in addition to these figures, Native American mythologies have in common a deep reverence for the earth and for community responsibility as opposed to individualism—tenets that stand in stark contrast to the concepts of exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny that characterize the United States, a nation that was built on ancient tribal land.
[more]

logo for University of Chicago Press
Tales of the Field
On Writing Ethnography
John Van Maanen
University of Chicago Press, 1988

For more than twenty years, John Van Maanen’s Tales of the Field has been a definitive reference and guide for students, scholars, and practitioners of ethnography and beyond. Originally published in 1988, it was the one of the first works to detail and critically analyze the various styles and narrative conventions associated with written representations of culture. This is a book about the deskwork of fieldwork and the various ways culture is put forth in print. The core of the work is an extended discussion and illustration of three forms or genres of cultural representation—realist tales, confessional tales, and impressionist tales. The novel issues raised in Tales concern authorial voice, style, truth, objectivity, and point-of-view. Over the years, the work has both reflected and shaped changes in the field of ethnography.

In this second edition, Van Maanen’s substantial new Epilogue charts and illuminates changes in the field since the book’s first publication. Refreshingly humorous and accessible, Tales of the Field remains an invaluable introduction to novices learning the trade of fieldwork and a cornerstone of reference for veteran ethnographers.  

[more]

front cover of Tales of the Field
Tales of the Field
On Writing Ethnography, Second Edition
John Van Maanen
University of Chicago Press, 2011

For more than twenty years, John Van Maanen’s Tales of the Field has been a definitive reference and guide for students, scholars, and practitioners of ethnography and beyond. Originally published in 1988, it was the one of the first works to detail and critically analyze the various styles and narrative conventions associated with written representations of culture. This is a book about the deskwork of fieldwork and the various ways culture is put forth in print. The core of the work is an extended discussion and illustration of three forms or genres of cultural representation—realist tales, confessional tales, and impressionist tales. The novel issues raised in Tales concern authorial voice, style, truth, objectivity, and point-of-view. Over the years, the work has both reflected and shaped changes in the field of ethnography.

In this second edition, Van Maanen’s substantial new Epilogue charts and illuminates changes in the field since the book’s first publication. Refreshingly humorous and accessible, Tales of the Field remains an invaluable introduction to novices learning the trade of fieldwork and a cornerstone of reference for veteran ethnographers.  

[more]

front cover of Tales of the Metric System
Tales of the Metric System
A Novel
Imraan Coovadia
Ohio University Press, 2016
In Tales of the Metric System, Coovadia explores a turbulent South Africa from 1970 into the present. He takes his home country’s transition from imperial to metric measurements as his catalyst, holding South Africa up and examining it from the diverse perspectives of his many characters. An elite white housewife married to a radical intellectual; a rock guitarist; the same guitarist’s granddaughter thirty years later; a teenaged boy at the mercy of mob justice—each story takes place over one of ten days across the decades, and each protagonist has his own stakes, her own moment in time, but each is equally caught in the eddies of change. Tales of the Metric System is clear eyed, harrowing, and daring.
[more]

front cover of Tales of the Mighty Dead
Tales of the Mighty Dead
Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality
Robert B. Brandom
Harvard University Press, 2002

A work in the history of systematic philosophy that is itself animated by a systematic philosophic aspiration, this book by one of the most prominent American philosophers working today provides an entirely new way of looking at the development of Western philosophy from Descartes to the present.

Brandom begins by setting out a historical context and outlining a methodological rationale for his enterprise. Then, in chapters on Spinoza, Leibniz, Hegel, Frege, Heidegger, and Sellars, he pursues the most fundamental philosophical issues concerning intentionality, and therefore mindedness itself, revealing an otherwise invisible set of overlapping themes and explanatory strategies. Variously functionalist, inferentialist, holist, normative, and social pragmatist in character, the explanations of intentionality offered by these philosophers, taken together, form a distinctive tradition. The fresh perspective afforded by this tradition enriches our understanding of the philosophical topics being addressed, provides a new conceptual vantage point for viewing our philosophical ancestors, and highlights central features of the sort of rationality that consists in discerning a philosophical tradition--and it does so by elaborating a novel, concrete instance of just such an enterprise.

[more]

front cover of Tales of the Prague Ghetto
Tales of the Prague Ghetto
Siegfried Kapper
Karolinum Press, 2022
A collection of nineteenth-century folklore-infused tales of Jewish life in Prague.
 
Trained in philosophy and medicine, the writer, translator, scholar, and political and cultural activist Siegfried Kapper (1821–1879) devoted significant effort to the advancement of Jewish culture in Bohemia, Jewish emancipation, and to the commitment of Jews to contemporary Czech society. The three stories in this collection, which first appeared in the press in the 1840s and were posthumously published as a collection at the end of the century, offer a Romantic and folkloric vision of Jewish culture in Prague.

The first story, “Genenda,” displays Kapper’s operatic eye for detail and drama with its account of a dutiful rabbi’s daughter being swept away by a dashing young man, a Christian nobleman disguised as a Jew. “The Curious Guest” is an intricate tale of a quest for wisdom and power. The final story, “Glowing Coals,” is a supernatural tale of romantic desire and revenge, displaying Kapper’s skill at deploying the tropes of folklore for dramatic literary effect. The collection not only provides a colorful snapshot of nineteenth-century Czech-Jewish culture but also resonates with universal human themes that transcend a single national experience.
[more]

front cover of Tales of the Wild Horse Desert
Tales of the Wild Horse Desert
By Betty Bailey Colley and Jane Clements Monday
University of Texas Press, 2001

Highly skilled, hard-working, and loyal to each other and to the ranches that employ them, the Mexican and Mexican American vaqueros who work on the famous King and Kenedy Ranches of South Texas' Wild Horse Desert are some of America's best cowboys. Many of them come from families who have lived and worked on the ranches for over a hundred years. They preserve the memories of ranch life handed down by their grandparents and great-grandparents, even as they use modern technologies to keep the ranches running smoothly in the twenty-first century.

This book tells the stories of the vaqueros of the Wild Horse Desert for fourth- through eighth-grade students. It begins with a brief history of the vaqueros and the King and Kenedy Ranches. Then, using in the words of today's vaqueros and their families, it describes many aspects of past and present life on the ranches. Young readers will learn what it's like to grow up on the ranches and how vaqueros learn their work. They'll also discover how much goes into being a vaquero, from using all the different ropes and equipment, to working a round-up, to showing prize-winning cattle and horses. Teachers and parents will appreciate all the supplemental material in the appendix, including a glossary, lists of related books and websites, hands-on learning activities, and even range and camp house recipes.

[more]

front cover of Tales of Times Now Past
Tales of Times Now Past
Sixty-Two Stories from a Medieval Japanese Collection
Marian Ury
University of Michigan Press, 1993
Tales of Times Now Past is a translation of 62 outstanding tales freshly selected from Konjaku monogatari shu, a Japanese anthology dating from the early twelfth century. The original work, unique in world literature, contains more than one thousand systematically arranged tales from India, China, and Japan. It is the most important example of a genre of collections of brief tales which, because of their informality and unpretentious style, were neglected by Japanese critics until recent years but which are now acknowledged to be among the most significant prose literature of premodern Japan. “Konjaku” in particular has aroused the enthusiasm of such leading 20th-century writers as Akutagawa Ryunosuke and Tanizaki Jun’ichiro.
The stories, with sources in both traditional lore and contemporary gossip, cover an astonishing range—homiletic, sentimental, terrifying, practical-minded, humorous, ribald. Their topics include the life of the Buddha, descriptions of Heaven and Hell, feats of warriors, craftsmen, and musicians, unsuspected vice, virtue, and ingenuity, and the ways and wiles of bandits, ogres, and proverbially greedy provincial governors, to name just a few. Composed perhaps a century after the refined, allusive, aristocratic Tale of Genji, Konjaku represents a masculine outlook and comparatively plebeian social orientation, standing in piquant contrast to the earlier masterpiece. The unknown compiler was interested less in exploring psychological subtleties than in presenting vivid portraits of human foibles and eccentricities. The stories in the present selection have been chosen to provide an idea of the scope and structure of the book as a whole, and also for their appeal to the modern reader. And the translation is based on the premise that the most faithful rendering is also the liveliest.
[more]

front cover of Tales of Transit
Tales of Transit
Narrative Migrant Spaces in Atlantic Perspective, 1850-1950
Edited by Michael Boyden, Hans Krabbendam, and Liselotte Vandenbussche
Amsterdam University Press, 2013
Traditionally, migration has been studied at either the beginning or the end of the journey. Surprisingly little research has been devoted to what actually happens to people in between. The contributors to this collection draw on a variety of primary and secondary sources, including travel writings, fiction, and diaries, to explore immigrants' liminal experiences on ships and in exit ports on both sides of the Atlantic. Combining scholarship from the field of transportation history with that of social history and translation studies, Tales of Transit reveals the complexity of what people experience as they get uprooted or reattach themselves to a community. A novel addition to the literature of transatlantic movements of the mid-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Tales of Transit demonstrates in vivid detail how migration was seldom a straightforward progression. 
[more]

front cover of Tales of Trilussa
Tales of Trilussa
Carlo Albert Salustri
University of Arkansas Press, 1990
The greatest poet of the twentieth century to write in Romanesco, Trilussa (1887–1950) gained national and international standing, becoming one of those extremely rare poets who have made their living entirely from their own work. John DuVal chose for translation the best poems from Tutte le poesie, Trilussa’s collected poems, which capture the satire and comic-lyric sensibility of this beloved Roman poet.
[more]

front cover of Tales of Two Cities
Tales of Two Cities
Race and Economic Culture in Early Republican North and South America
By Camilla Townsend
University of Texas Press, 2000

With a common heritage as former colonies of Europe, why did the United States so outstrip Latin America in terms of economic development in the nineteenth century? In this innovative study, Camilla Townsend challenges the traditional view that North Americans succeeded because of better attitudes toward work—the Protestant work ethic—and argues instead that they prospered because of differences in attitudes towards workers that evolved in the colonial era.

Townsend builds her study around workers' lives in two very similar port cities in the 1820s and 1830s. Through the eyes of the young Frederick Douglass in Baltimore, Maryland, and an Indian woman named Ana Yagual in Guayaquil, Ecuador, she shows how differing attitudes towards race and class in North and South America affected local ways of doing business. This empirical research significantly clarifies the relationship between economic culture and racial identity and its long-term effects.

[more]

logo for University of Illinois Press
Tales of Wayward Girls and Immoral Women
Case Records and the Professionalization of Social Work
Karen W. Tice
University of Illinois Press, 1998
Writing case records was central to the professionalization of social work, a task that by its very nature "created clients, authorities, problems, and solutions." In Tales of Wayward Girls and Immoral Women, Karen W. Tice argues that when early social workers wrote about their clients they transformed individual biographies into professional representations. Because the social workers were attuned to the intricacies of language, case records became focal points for debates on science, art, representation, objectivity, realism, and gender in public charity and reform. Tice uses 150 case records of early practitioners from a number of reform organizations and considers myriad books on the specifics of case recording to analyze the competing models of record-keeping, both in the field and outside it.

"An original and important study, this is the first major work I know of to carry out a contextual analysis of case records and to discuss the role case records have played in the development of social work." -- Leslie Leighninger, author of Social Work, Social Welfare, and American Society
 
[more]

front cover of Tales, Tunes, and Tassa Drums
Tales, Tunes, and Tassa Drums
Retention and Invention into Indo-Caribbean Music
Peter Manuel
University of Illinois Press, 2015
Today's popular tassa drumming emerged from the fragments of transplanted Indian music traditions half-forgotten and creatively recombined, rearticulated, and elaborated into a dynamic musical genre. A uniquely Indo-Trinidadian form, tassa drumming invites exploration of how the distinctive nature of the Indian diaspora and its relationship to its ancestral homeland influenced Indo-Caribbean music culture.
 
Music scholar Peter Manuel traces the roots of neotraditional music genres like tassa drumming to North India and reveals the ways these genres represent survivals, departures, or innovative elaborations of transplanted music forms. Drawing on ethnographic work and a rich archive of field recordings, he contemplates the music carried to Trinidad by Bhojpuri-speaking and other immigrants, including forms that died out in India but continued to thrive in the Caribbean. His reassessment of ideas of creolization, retention, and cultural survival defies suggestions that the diaspora experience inevitably leads to the loss of the original culture, while also providing avenues to broader applications for work being done in other ethnic contexts.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Technique in the Tales of Henry James
Krishna Baldev Vaid
Harvard University Press

front cover of Telling Stories the Kiowa Way
Telling Stories the Kiowa Way
Gus Palmer
University of Arizona Press, 2003
Among the Kiowa, storytelling takes place under familiar circumstances. A small group of relatives and close friends gather. Tales are informative as well as entertaining. Joking and teasing are key components. Group participation is expected. And outsiders are seldom involved.

This book explores the traditional art of storytelling still practiced by Kiowas today as Gus Palmer shares conversations held with storytellers. Combining narrative, personal experience, and ethnography in an original and artful way, Palmer—an anthropologist raised in a traditional Kiowa family—shows not only that storytelling remains an integral part of Kiowa culture but also that narratives embedded in everyday conversation are the means by which Kiowa cultural beliefs and values are maintained.

Palmer's study features contemporary oral storytelling and other discourses, assembled over two and a half years of fieldwork, that demonstrate how Kiowa storytellers practice their art. Focusing on stories and their meaning within a narrative and ethnographic context, he draws on a range of material, including dream stories, stories about the coming of Táimê (the spirit of the Sun Dance) to the Kiowas, and stories of tricksters and tribal heroes. He shows how storytellers employ the narrative devices of actively participating in oral narratives, leaving stories wide open, or telling stories within stories. And he demonstrates how stories can reflect a wide range of sensibilities, from magical realism to gossip.

Firmly rooted in current linguistic anthropological thought, Telling Stories the Kiowa Way is a work of analysis and interpretation that helps us understand story within its larger cultural contexts. It combines the author's unique literary talent with his people's equally unique perspective on anthropological questions in a text that can be enjoyed on multiple levels by scholars and general readers alike.

[more]

front cover of The Temptation of Despair
The Temptation of Despair
Tales of the 1940s
Werner Sollors
Harvard University Press, 2014

In Germany, the years immediately following World War II call forward images of obliterated cities, hungry refugees, and ghostly monuments to Nazi crimes. The temptation of despair was hard to resist, and to contemporary observers the road toward democracy in the Western zones of occupation seemed rather uncertain. Drawing on a vast array of American, German, and other sources—diaries, photographs, newspaper articles, government reports, essays, works of fiction, and film—Werner Sollors makes visceral the experiences of defeat and liberation, homelessness and repatriation, concentration camps and denazification.

These tales reveal writers, visual artists, and filmmakers as well as common people struggling to express the sheer magnitude of the human catastrophe they witnessed. Some relied on traditional images of suffering and death, on Biblical scenes of the Flood and the Apocalypse. Others shaped the mangled, nightmarish landscape through abstract or surreal forms of art. Still others turned to irony and black humor to cope with the incongruities around them. Questions about guilt and complicity in a totalitarian country were raised by awareness of the Holocaust, making “After Dachau” a new epoch in Western history.

The Temptation of Despair is a book about coming to terms with the mid-1940s, the contradictory emotions of a defeated people—sorrow and anger, guilt and pride, despondency and resilience—as well as the ambiguities and paradoxes of Allied victory and occupation.

[more]

front cover of Theory and History of Folklore
Theory and History of Folklore
Vladimir Propp
University of Minnesota Press, 1984

front cover of The Things That Fly in the Night
The Things That Fly in the Night
Female Vampires in Literature of the Circum-Caribbean and African Diaspora
Giselle Liza Anatol
Rutgers University Press, 2015
The Things That Fly in the Night explores images of vampirism in Caribbean and African diasporic folk traditions and in contemporary fiction. Giselle Liza Anatol focuses on the figure of the soucouyant, or Old Hag—an aged woman by day who sheds her skin during night’s darkest hours in order to fly about her community and suck the blood of her unwitting victims. In contrast to the glitz, glamour, and seductiveness of conventional depictions of the European vampire, the soucouyant triggers unease about old age and female power. Tracing relevant folklore through the English- and French-speaking Caribbean, the U.S. Deep South, and parts of West Africa, Anatol shows how tales of the nocturnal female bloodsuckers not only entertain and encourage obedience in pre-adolescent listeners, but also work to instill particular values about women’s “proper” place and behaviors in society at large. 
 
[more]

logo for Ohio University Press
Timberline Tailings
Tales Of Colorado'S Ghost Towns And Mining Camps
Muriel Sibell Wolle
Ohio University Press, 1993
Timberline Tailings is a follow-up volume which the author published in 1977, after years of receiving letters from people who related their own stories, directions and data about Colorado mining camps after reading Stampede to Timberline. — Sn3 Modeler
[more]

front cover of Treehab
Treehab
Tales from My Natural, Wild Life
Bob Smith
University of Wisconsin Press, 2016
In this bitingly funny and often surprising memoir, award-winning author and groundbreaking comedian Bob Smith offers a meditation on the vitality of the natural world—and an intimate portrait of his own darkly humorous and profoundly authentic response to a life-changing illness.
            In Treehab—named after a retreat cabin in rural Ontario—Smith muses how he has “always sought the path less traveled.” He rebuffs his diagnosis of ALS as only an unflappable stand-up comic could (“Lou Gehrig’s Disease?  But I don’t even like baseball!”) and explores his complex, fulfilling experience of fatherhood, both before and after the onset of the disease.
          Stories of his writing and performing life—punctuated by hilariously cutting jokes that comedians tell only to each other—are interspersed with tales of Smith’s enduring relationship with nature: boyhood sojourns in the woods of upstate New York and adult explorations of the remote Alaskan wilderness; snakes and turtles, rocks and minerals; open sky and forest canopy; God and friendship—all recurring touchstones that inspire him to fight for his survival and for the future of his two children.
          Aiming his potent, unflinching wit at global warming, equal rights, sex, dogs, Thoreau, and more, Smith demonstrates here the inimitable insight that has made him a beloved voice of a generation. He reminds us that life is perplexing, beautiful, strange, and entirely worth celebrating.
[more]

front cover of Truth and Tales
Truth and Tales
Cultural Mobility and Medieval Media
Fiona Somerset and Nicholas Watson
The Ohio State University Press, 2015
In the medieval period, as in the media culture of the present, learned and popular forms of talk were intermingled everywhere. They were also highly mobile, circulating in speech, writing, and symbol, as performances as well as in material objects. The communication through and between different media we all negotiate in daily life did not develop from a previous separation of orality and writing, but from a communications network not unlike our own, if slower, and similarly shaped by disparities of access. Truth and Tales: Cultural Mobility and Medieval Media, edited by Fiona Somerset and Nicholas Watson, develops a variety of approaches to the labor of imaginatively reconstructing this network from its extant artifacts.
 
Truth and Tales includes fourteen essays by medieval literary scholars and historians. Some essays focus on written artifacts that convey high or popular learning in unexpected ways. Others address a social problem of concern to all, demonstrating the genres and media through which it was negotiated. Still others are centered on one or more texts, detailing their investments in popular as well as learned knowledge, in performance as well as writing. This collective archaeology of medieval media provides fresh insight for medieval scholars and media theorists alike.
[more]

logo for American Library Association
Twenty Tellable Tales
Audience Participation Folktales for the Beginning Storyteller
Margaret Read MacDonald
American Library Association, 2005

logo for University of Chicago Press
Two Evenings in Saramaka
Richard Price and Sally Price
University of Chicago Press, 1991
"Whatever has gotten into the Prices?" asks the apocryphal Professor Goodfellow in the opening lines of Two Evenings in Saramaka. "After all those books on history and ethnography," he muses, "why are they now turning to children's stories and nonsense songs—mere folklore?"

In this innovative work, Richard and Sally Price explore the fully adult world of Saramaka "folktale-land," where animals speak, the social order is inverted, customs have been only partially worked out, and the weak and clever triumph over the strong and arrogant. Joining the Saramaka of the Suriname rain forest for two tale-telling wakes, we witness mischievous Anasi the spider matching wits with lecherous devils, the scrawny little kid rescuing his nubile sisters in distress, and the bitchy white princess being tamed by the one-sided boy. As seas dry up, books speak out loud, and elephants assume human form, we are present at a whole sequence of world-shaping happenings such as the invention of sex, the discovery of drums, and the arrival of death among humans.

Set in the more general context of tale telling by the descendants of Africans throughout the Americas and of recent scholarship in performance studies, these Saramaka tales are presented as a dramatic script. With the help of nearly forty photographs, readers become familiar not only with the characters in folktale-land, but also with the men and women who so imaginatively bring them to life. And because music complements narration in Saramaka just as it does elsewhere in Afro-America, more than fifty songs are presented here in musical notation.

Narrative, song, dance, and social interaction merge in these two evenings of multimedia entertainment, bearing witness to an Afro-American cultural tradition that remains alive and vibrant, constantly renewed but always reflecting its links with the past.
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter