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The essays in Folklore Genres represent development in folklore genre studies, diverging into literary, ethnographic, and taxonomic questions. The study as a whole is concerned with the concept of genre and with the history of genre theory. A selective bibliography provides a guide to analytical and theoretical works on the topic.
The literary-oriented articles conceive of folklore forms, not as the antecedents of literary genres, but as complex, symbolically rich expressions. The ethnographically oriented articles, as well as those dealing with classification problems, reveal dimensions of folklore that are often obscured from the student reading the folklore text alone. It has long been known that the written page is but a pale reproduction of the spoken word, that a tale hardly reflects the telling. The essays in this collection lead to an understanding of the forms of oral literature as multidimensional symbols of communication and to an understanding of folklore genres as systematically related conceptual categories in culture. What kinship terms are to social structure, genre terms are to folklore. Since genres constitute recognized modes of folklore speaking, their terminology and taxonomy can play a major role in the study of culture and society.
The essays were originally published in Genre (1969-1971); introduction, bibliography, and index have been added to this edition.
List of contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Dan Ben-Amos
- Part One. Literary and Linguistic Analysis of Folklore Genres
- 1. Oral Genres as a Bridge to Written Literature (Francis Lee Utley)
- 2. Aspects of the Märchen and the Legend (Max Lüthi)
- 3. The Generic Nature of Oral Epic Poetry (David E. Bynum)
- 4. The Blues as a Genre (Harry Oster)
- 5. On Defining the Riddle: The Problem of a Structural Unit (Charles T. Scott)
- Part Two. The Ethnography of Folklore Genres
- 6. Legend and Belief (Linda Dégh and Andrew Vázsonyi)
- 7. Proverbs: A Social Use of Metaphor (Peter Seitel)
- 8. The “Pretty Languages” of Yellowman: Genre, Mode, and Texture in Navaho Coyote Narratives (Barre Toelken)
- 9. Japanese Professional Storytellers (V. Hrdli¿ková)
- Part Three. The Classification of Folklore Genres
- 10. The Complex Relations of Simple Forms (Roger D. Abrahams)
- 11. Analytical Categories and Ethnic Genres (Dan Ben-Amos)
- Notes on the Contributors
- A Selected Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Dan Ben-Amos is Professor of Folklore and of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
