Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

"This is the first book to combine contemporary debates in ballad studies with the insights of modern textual scholarship. Just like canonical literature and music, the ballad should not be seen as a uniquely authentic item inextricably tied to a documented source, but rather as an unstable structure subject to the vagaries of production, reception, and editing. Among the matters addressed are topics central to the subject, including ballad origins, oral and printed transmission, sound and writing, agency and editing, and textual and melodic indeterminacy and instability. While drawing on the time-honoured materials of ballad studies, the book offers a theoretical framework for the discipline to complement the largely ethnographic approach that has dominated in recent decades. Primarily directed at the community of ballad and folk song scholars, the book will be of interest to researchers in several adjacent fields, including folklore, oral literature, ethnomusicology, and textual scholarship."--Publisher's website.

Ballads, English -- England -- History and criticism. --- Ballads, Scots -- Scotland -- History and criticism. --- English --- Languages & Literatures --- English Literature --- Ballads, English --- Ballads, Scots --- History and criticism. --- literature --- folklore --- music --- ballad

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

It would be difficult to imagine what human life would be like without stories—from myths recited by Pueblo Indian healers in the kiva, ballads sung in Slovenian market squares, folktales and legends told by the fireside in Italy, to jokes told at a dinner table in Des Moines—for it is chiefly through storytelling that people possess a past.In Homo Narrans John D. Niles explores how human beings shape their world through the stories they tell. The book vividly weaves together the study of Anglo-Saxon literature and culture with the author's own engagements in the field with some of the greatest twentieth-century singers and storytellers in the Scottish tradition. Niles ponders the nature of the storytelling impulse, the social function of narrative, and the role of individual talent in oral tradition. His investigation of the poetics of oral narrative encompasses literary works, such as the epic poems and hymns of early Greece and the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf, texts that we know only through written versions but that are grounded in oral technique.That all forms of narrative, even the most sophisticated genres of contemporary fiction, have their ultimate origin in storytelling is a point that scarcely needs to be argued. Niles's claims here are more ambitious: that oral narrative is and has long been the chief basis of culture itself, that the need to tell stories is what distinguishes humans from all other living creatures.

Folk literature. --- Oral tradition. --- Storytelling. --- Story-telling --- Telling of stories --- Oral interpretation --- Children's stories --- Folklore --- Oral interpretation of fiction --- Tradition, Oral --- Oral communication --- Oral history --- Oral literature --- Literature --- Performance --- Littérature orale --- Ballads, English - England - History and criticism. --- Poésie anglaise --- Écosse --- Ballads, English