Ruth Finneganâ s Oral Literature in Africa was first published in 1970, and since then has been widely praised as one of the most important books in its field. Based on years of fieldwork, the study ...traces the history of storytelling across the continent of Africa. This revised edition makes Finneganâ s ground-breaking research available to the next generation of scholars. It includes a new introduction, additional images and an updated bibliography, as well as its original chapters on poetry, prose, "drum language" and drama, and an overview of the social, linguistic and historical background of oral literature in Africa. Oral Literature in Africa has been accessed by hundreds of readers in over 60 different countries, including Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda and numerous other African countries. The digital editions of this book are free to download thanks to the generous support of interested readers and organisations, who made donations using the crowd-funding website Unglue.it. Oral Literature in Africa is part of our World Oral Literature Series in conjunction with the World Oral Literature Project.
Sand stories from Central Australia are a traditional form of Aboriginal women's verbal art that incorporates speech, song, sign, gesture and drawing. Small leaves and other objects may be used to ...represent story characters. This detailed study of Arandic sand stories takes a multimodal approach to the analysis of the stories and shows how the expressive elements used in the stories are orchestrated together. This richly illustrated volume is essential reading for anyone interested in language and communication. It adds to the growing recognition that language encompasses much more than speech alone, and shows how important it is to consider the different semiotic resources a culture brings to its communicative tasks as an integrated whole rather than in isolation.
How the Wise Men Got to Chelmis the first in-depth study of Chelm literature and its relationship to its literary precursors.
When God created the world, so it is said, he sent out an angel with a ...bag of foolish souls with instructions to distribute them equally all over the world-one fool per town. But the angel's bag broke and all the souls spilled out onto the same spot. They built a settlement where they landed: the town is known as Chelm.
The collected tales of these fools, or "wise men," of Chelm constitute the best-known folktale tradition of the Jews of eastern Europe. This tradition includes a sprawling repertoire of stories about the alleged intellectual limitations of the members of this old and important Jewish community. Chelm did not make its debut in the role of the foolishshtetlpar excellence until late in the nineteenth century. Since then, however, the town has led a double life-as a real city in eastern Poland and as an imaginary place onto which questions of Jewish identity, community, and history have been projected.By placing literary Chelm and its "foolish" antecedents in a broader historical context, it shows how they have functioned for over three hundred years as models of society, somewhere between utopia and dystopia. These imaginary foolish towns have enabled writers both to entertain and highlight a variety of societal problems, a function that literary Chelm continues to fulfill in Jewish literature to this day.
Variation is a universal phenomenon permeating language, culture, and entire worldviews. This book analyses issues related to both specific and common variations in folklore and language as ...signifiers of culture and worldview. The articles here are dedicated to different genres and forms, including spoken and written language, dancing and singing, and festivities, and involve different aspects of variation. Variation is conceptualised here as the main basis of folklore dynamics and a major issue of typology. A significant part of the volume is dedicated to variations of myths and motifs, creativity, intertextuality, and transmediality.
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