Carmen Blacker was an outstanding scholar of Japanese culture, known for her writings on religion, myth and folklore -most notably The Catalpa Bow. A third of the volume comprises extracts from her ...diaries covering more than forty years, with a plate section drawn from her photographic archive - an opportunity for insight into her life and work.
W.B. Yeats had a key role in the Irish folklore. Before writing his masterpieces, often arising froman original encounter between folklore and literature, the young Yeats was directly concerned ...withthe collecting of folklore. Initially he had worked as an editor, drawing his material from a varietyof XIX century’s narrative collections; however, through this editing he had already sketched hisown idea of folklore. With his later work, The Celtic Twilight, Yeats became a first-hand collector,thus acting as a folklorist. A singular kind of folklorist, indeed, who addressed his materialaccording to views and goals quite distant from the canonical approach of an ethnographic research.His was the approach of a writer seeking in folklore a different kind of literature. Hence, are welegitimized to regard Yeats as a folklorist? How to evaluate his unorthodox methodology? Was hisapproach unsuitable? Or, perhaps, by treating his material as a dynamic, living issue, rather than astatic, outdated item, was this approach more fitting for understanding folklore? These are somequestions I discuss in my paper, so as to develop a critical reassessment of the concept of folklore,its methods and aims.
In a speech delivered as the Presidential Address for the 2021 American Folklore Society (AFS) annual meeting, Cantu shares her deepest gratitude to the membership of AFS. She also talks about the ...present, signaling and highlighting the extraordinary times we are living in and the challenges such a reality poses for our work, for AFS, and for society in general.
