Folklore

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  Explaining Traditions: Folk Behavior in Modern Culture

  This book discusses the underlying reasons for the continuing popularity of traditions, delving into their social and psychological roles in everyday life. The book argues that despite intellectual and political movements to dismiss tradition as a force in social life, the concept has persisted and remained important to people in the formation of modern culture and folklore. The book points to the functions of traditions as cultural expressions connecting the past and the present, and engaging and adapting practices as symbolic projections of anxieties, hopes, and aspirations. Traditions that are covered include architecture, craft, legends, tales, sports, and the Internet. ...Read More

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  Kentucky Folktales: Revealing Stories, Truths, and Outright Lies

  The storytelling tradition has long been an important piece of Kentucky history and culture. Folktales, legends, tall tales, and ghost stories hold a special place in the imaginations of inventive storytellers and captive listeners. In Kentucky Folktales: Revealing Stories, Truths, and Outright Lies Kentucky storyteller Mary Hamilton narrates a range of stories with the voice and creativity only a master storyteller can evoke.

  Hamilton has perfected the art of entrancing an audience no matter the subject of her tales. Kentucky Folktales includes stories about Daniel Boone’s ability to single-handedly kill a bear, a daughter who saves her father’s land by ...Read More

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  Funeral Festivals in America: Rituals for the Living

  When Evelyn Waugh wrote The Loved One (1948) as a satire of the elaborate preparations and memorialization of the dead taking place in his time, he had no way of knowing how technical and extraordinarily creative human funerary practices would become in the ensuing decades.

  In Funeral Festivals in America, author Jacqueline S. Thursby explores how modern American funerals and their accompanying rituals have evolved into affairs that help the living with the healing process. Thursby suggests that there is irony in the festivities surrounding death. The typical American response to death often develops into a celebration that reestablishes links ...Read More

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  Lucifer Ascending: The Occult in Folklore and Popular Culture

  Despite their centuries-old history and traditions, witchcraft and magic are still very much a part of modern Anglo-American culture. In Lucifer Ascending, Bill Ellis looks at modern practices that are universally defined as “occult,” from commonplace habits such as carrying a rabbit’s foot for good luck or using a Ouija board, to more esoteric traditions, such as the use of spell books. In particular, Ellis shows how the occult has been a common element in youth culture for hundreds of years.

  Using materials from little known publications and archives, Lucifer Ascending details the true social function of individuals’ dabbling with ...Read More

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  Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales

  This revised, expanded, and updated edition of the 1979 landmark Breaking the Magic Spell examines the enduring power of fairy tales and the ways they invade our subjective world. In seven provocative essays, Zipes discusses the importance of investigating oral folk tales in their socio-political context and traces their evolution into literary fairy tales, a metamorphosis that often diminished the ideology of the original narrative. Zipes also looks at how folk tales influence our popular beliefs and the ways they have been exploited by a corporate media network intent on regulating the mystical elements of the stories. He examines a ...Read More

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  The Hallowed Eve: Dimensions of Culture in a Calendar Festival in Northern Ireland

  In Northern Ireland, Halloween is such a major celebration that it is often called the Irish Christmas. A day of family reunions, meals, and fun, Halloween brings people of all ages together with rhyming, storytelling, family fireworks, and community bonfires. Perhaps most important, it has become a day that transcends the social conflict found in this often troubled nation. Through the extensive use of interviews, The Hallowed Eve offers a fascinating look at the various customs, both past and present, that mark the celebration of the holiday. Looking through the lenses of gender, ethnicity, and religious affiliation, Jack Santino examines ...Read More

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  From Game to War and Other Psychoanalytic Essays on Folklore

  Although folklore has been collected for centuries, its possible unconscious content and significance have been explored only since the advent of psychoanalytic theory. Freud and some of his early disciples recognized the potential of such folklorist genres as myth, folktale, and legend to illuminate the intricate workings of the human psyche. Alan Dundes is a renowned folklorist who has successfully devoted the better part of his career to applying psychoanalytic theory to the materials of folklore. From Game to War offers five of his most mature essays on this topic.

  Dundes begins with a comprehensive survey of the history of ...Read More

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  Flatheads and Spooneys: Fishing for a Living in the Ohio River Valley

  Since the early 1800s, people have made a living fishing and harvesting mussels in the lower Ohio Valley. These river folk are conscious of an occupational and social identity separate from those who earn their living from the land. Sustained by a shared love of the river, deriving joy from the beauty of their chosen environment, and feeling great pride in their ability to subsist on its wild resources and to master the skills required to make a living from it, many still identify with the nomadic houseboat-dwelling subculture that flourished on the river from the early nineteenth century to ...Read More

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  Putting Folklore To Use

  Essays by thirteen folklorists explore applications in such areas as museums, aiding the homeless, environmental planning, art therapy, designing public spaces, organizing development, tourism, the public sector, aging, and creating an occupation's image.

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  Killings: Folk Justice in the Upper South

  The “State Line Country” of this book is a rugged area of small farms on the Kentucky-Tennessee border. Historically the area has had a homicide rate more than ten times the national average.

  In this gripping and penetrating study of violence and death in the State Line Country, Lynwood Montell examines the local historical and social conditions, as well as the prevailing attitudes and values, that gave rise and support to rowdy behavior and homicidal acts from the Civil War to the 1930s. The area fostered, he thinks, a culture of violence. Drawing from vivid oral accounts, which he recorded ...Read More