The Study of Folklore

Politics & Social Sciences

Alan Dundes

Social Sciences

Pearson College Div

In Quest of the Hero makes available for a new generation of readers two key works on hero myths: Otto Rank's Myth of the Birth of the Hero and the central section of Lord Raglan's The Hero. Amplifying these is Alan Dundes's fascinating contemporary inquiry, "The Hero Pattern and the Life of Jesus." Examined here are the patterns found in the lore surrounding historical or legendary figures like Gilgamesh, Moses, David, Oedipus, Odysseus, Perseus, Heracles, Aeneas, Romulus, Siegfried, Lohengrin, Arthur, and Buddha. Rank's monograph remains the classic application of Freudian theory to hero myths. In The Hero the noted English ethnologist Raglan singles out the myth-ritualist pattern in James Frazer's many-sided Golden Bough and applies that pattern to hero myths. Dundes, the eminent folklorist at the University of California at Berkeley, applies the theories of Rank, Raglan, and others to the case of Jesus. In his introduction to this selection from Rank, Raglan, and Dundes, Robert Segal, author of the major study of Joseph Campbell, charts the history of theorizing about hero myths and compares the approaches of Rank, Raglan, Dundes, and Campbell.

In Quest of the Hero

Lord Raglan

Otto, Rank

Princeton University Press

Never Try to Teach a Pig to Sing documents the thriving folklore tradition that circulates in the workplace. Alan Dundes and Carl Pagter have collected more than two hundred and fifty "signs of the times"-the office memoranda, parodies, cartoons, and poems that daily make their way through copy machines, interoffice mail systems, and fax machines and are affixed to bulletin boards and water coolers. The rich vein of urban folklore tapped by this imaginative volume constitutes a great testament to one of the world's most prolific authors-anonymous. The popularity of the items featured in this timely book is apparent by their reproduction in mass or popular cultural form-as greeting cards, plaques, and bumper stickers-reminding us of the inevitable interplay between folklore and mass culture. Dundes and Pagter clearly demonstrate the existence of folklore in the modern urban technological world and refute the notion that folklore reflects only the past.

Never Try to Teach a Pig to Sing: Still More Urban Folklore from the Paperwork Empire (Humor in Life and Letters)

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

Wayne State Univ Pr

Oedipus Myth Pb

Lowell Edmunds

Scholarly Title

Exploring the scope, diversity, and vitality of black culture, here is a fascinating collection of more than sixty articles from some of the most perceptive and authoritative commentators upon the black experience--Zora Neale Hurston, J. Mason Brewer, Sterling A. Brown, Eldridge Cleaver, Willis Laurence James, John Lovell Jr., Langston Hughes, Charles W. Chesnutt, Alan Lomax, Ralph Ellison, A. Philip Randolph, Newbell Niles Puckett, Roger D. Abrahams, and many others.Readers cannot help coming away from this book with a new appreciation of the nature and richness of African American folklore. For those with little or no previous knowledge of this heterogeneous and spellbinding lore Mother Wit from the Laughing Barrel will be an eye-opening encounter.Drawn out of the deep, rich well of African American culture, these essays convey the import of the black folk experience for all Americans. No library or individual with a serious interest in African American folklore should fail to own this remarkable anthology.

Mother Wit From the Laughing Barrel

Garland

new edition with a further illustrative plates by Gini Lusini

La Terra in Piazza: An Interpretation of the Palio of Siena

Alessandro Falassi

Nuova Immagine

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Books by Alan Dundes