San Antonio College Library

As interest in folklore increases, the folktale acquires greater significance for students and teachers of literature. The material is massive and scattered; thus, few students or teachers have accessibility to other than small segments or singular tales or material they find buried in archives. Stith Thompson has divided his book into four sections which permit both the novice and the teacher to examine oral tradition and its manifestation in folklore....

In this wide-ranging and insightful analysis, the author proposes a poetics of narrative for postmodernism by placing new emphasis on the folktale. He beings by examining the key features of folktales: their emphasis on a chain of events rather than description or consciousness, their emphasis on a self-contained fictional environment rather than realism, the presence of a storyteller as a self-confessed fabricator, their oral and communal status,...

To many observers, folklore and book culture might appear to be opposites. Folklore, after all, involves orally circulated stories and traditions while book culture is concerned with the transmission of written texts. However, as Kevin J. Hayes points out, there are many instances where the two intersect, and exploring those intersections is the purpose of this fascinating and provocative study. Hayes shows that the acquisition of knowledge and the...

"Eli Yassif describes the major trends - structural, thematic, functional - of folk narrative in the central periods of Jewish culture and shows the social function and cultural meaning of the Hebrew folktale. Analyzing texts in their historical and cultural context, he examines the transmission of the Hebrew folktale and looks at the interaction between texts from different times and contexts."--Jacket.

"Few forms of storytelling have greater power to captivate the human mind than fairy tales, but where do these tales originate from, and what do they mean? Celebrated poet and bestselling author Robert Bly has been asking these questions throughout his career. Here Bly looks at six tales that have stood the test of time and have captivated the poet for decades, from "The Six Swans" to "The Frog Prince." Drawing on his own creative genius, and the...

"This book will give Propp's admirers in the English-speakling world a whole new perspective on this distinguished scholar's contribution to folkloristics. Liberman provides the necessary background in terms of Russian/Soviet intellectual (and political) currents to place Propp's work in a new light. No student of structuralism in folklore can afford to miss Liberman's anthology."--Alan Dundes (from cover).