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Folklore Rules is a brief introduction to the foundational concepts in folklore studies for beginning students. Designed to give essential background on the current study of folklore and some of the basic concepts and questions used when analyzing folklore, this short, coherent, and approachable handbook is divided into five chapters: 

• What Is Folklore?
• What Do Folklorists Do
• Types of Folklore
• Types of Folk Groups;
• What Do I Do Now?

These chapters guide students toward a working understanding of the field, learn basic terms and techniques, and learn to perceive the knowledge base and discourse frame for materials used in folklore courses. Folklore Rules has become a classic text, serving instructors and students for a variety of courses, including introductory folklore and comparative studies as well as literature, anthropology, and composition classes that include a folklore component.

When William Carlos Williams said, “It’s all in / the sound,” when T. S. Eliot hailed the invigorating force of the “auditory imagination,” or when Marianne Moore applauded “the clatter and true sound” of Williams’s verse, each poet invoked the dimension that bound them together. In Quick, Said the Bird, Richard Swigg makes the case for acoustics as the basis of the linkages, kinships, and inter-illuminations of a major twentieth-century literary relationship. Outsiders in their home terrain who nevertheless continued to reach back to their own American vocal identities, Williams, Eliot, and Moore embody a unique lineage that can be traced from their first significant works (1909–1918) to the 1960s.

 

In reconstructing the auditory dimension in the work of the three poets, Quick, Said the Bird does not neglect the visual text. Whether in the form of Moore’s quirky patternings, Eliot’s expandable verse-frames, or Williams’s springy stanzas, the printed shape on the page is here brought together with the spoken word in vital interplay: the eye-read text cut against by sequential utterance in a restoration of the poetry’s full effect. By seeing and hearing the verse at the same moment—together with reading side-by-side discussions of the quarrels, friendships, mutual borrowings, and shared energies of Williams, Eliot, and Moore—the reader gains a remarkable new understanding of their individual achievements.By sound and sight, Quick, Said the Bird takes the reader straight into the physical textures of the finest works by three outstanding figures of twentieth-century American poetry.

From the author of Until Your Heart Stops and Almost Home, Quick is T. M. McNally's collection of powerful and starkly honest stories of American life.

The stories in Quick are complex, sometimes harsh, yet always unafraid of the dark truths many of the characters are forced to confront. Dense and layered, these miniature and compact sagas endow their often damaged characters with uncommon brilliance. Themes of love, loss, addiction, and courage roam freely throughout, and the author sets an unforgettable and palpable tone that is exceedingly spare yet faceted with views of the richness beneath the surface of everyday life.