front cover of Inari Sámi Folklore
Inari Sámi Folklore
Stories from Aanaar
August V. Koskimies and Toivo I. Itkonen, revised by Lea Laitinen; Edited and translated by Tim Frandy
University of Wisconsin Press, 2020
A rich multivoiced anthology of folktales, legends, joik songs, proverbs, riddles, and other verbal art, this is the most comprehensive collection of Sámi oral tradition available in English to date. Collected by August V. Koskimies and Toivo I. Itkonen in the 1880s from nearly two dozen storytellers from the arctic Aanaar (Inari) region of northeast Finland, the material reveals a complex web of social relations that existed both inside and far beyond the community.

First published in 1918 only in the Aanaar Sámi language and in Finnish, this anthology is now available in a centennial English-language edition for a global readership. Translator Tim Frandy has added biographies of the storytellers, maps and period photos, annotations, and a glossary. In headnotes that contextualize the stories, he explains such underlying themes as Aanaar conflicts with neighboring Sámi and Finnish communities, the collapse of the wild reindeer populations less than a century before, and the pre-Christian past in Aanaar. He introduces us to the bawdy humor of Antti Kitti, the didacticism of Iisakki Mannermaa, and the feminist leanings of Juho Petteri Lusmaniemi, emphasizing that folktales and proverbs are rooted in the experiences of individuals who are links in a living tradition.
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An Introduction to Literary Chinese
Second Edition
Michael A. Fuller
Harvard University Press, 2024

The second edition of An Introduction to Literary Chinese incorporates recent developments in linguistics and has been expanded to include a lesson on Buddhist texts. Beginning with an overview of literary Chinese—its phonology, morphology, and syntax, as well as a short account of the nature of the writing system—the textbook then presents thirty-six lessons of increasing difficulty designed to introduce students to the basic patterns of the language and give them practice in reading a variety of texts.

Part I presents eight lessons on the basic syntactic components in literary Chinese. Each lesson begins with an overview of its topic, introduces an exemplary text, and provides a glossary, notes, and practice exercises. The sixteen lessons in Part II use increasingly long and complex texts to introduce styles of narrative and argumentation in literary Chinese and, at the same time, solidify students’ grasp of the syntax. The advanced texts in the six lessons in Part III introduce students to central authors and philosophical traditions in premodern China and broaden the process of reading to include elements of cultural and historical interpretation. Part IV has six lessons comprising important Tang and Song dynasty prose and poetic texts.

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Itineraries of Power
Texts and Traversals in Heian and Medieval Japan
Terry Kawashima
Harvard University Press, 2016

Movements—of people and groups, through travel, migration, exile, and diaspora—are central to understanding both local and global power relationships. But what of more literary moves: textual techniques such as distinct patterns of narrative flow, abrupt leaps between genres, and poetic figures that flatten geographical distance? This book examines what happens when both types of tropes—literal traversals and literary shifts—coexist.

Itineraries of Power examines prose narratives and poetry of the mid-Heian to medieval eras (900–1400) that conspicuously feature tropes of movement. Kawashima argues that the appearance of a character’s physical motion, alongside literary techniques identified with motion, is a textual signpost in a story, urging readers to focus on how the work conceptualizes relations of power and claims to authority. From the gendered intersection of register shifts in narrative and physical displacement in the Heian period, to a dizzying tale of travel retold multiple times in a single medieval text, the motion in these works gestures toward internal conflicts and alternatives to existing structures of power. The book concludes that texts crucially concerned with such tropes of movement suggest that power is always simultaneously manufactured and dismantled from within.

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