Folklore by the Fireside

Folklore by the Fireside

Author: Alessandro Falassi

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2014-07-03

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 0292772270

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For centuries, social life in rural Tuscany has centered around the veglia, an evening gathering of family and friends at the hearth. Folklore by the Fireside is a thorough and insightful study of this custom—from the tales, riddles, lullabies, and folk prayers performed as the small children are put to bed to the courtship songs and dances later in the evening to the anti-veglia male gossip, card games, and protest songs originating in the tavern. Alessandro Falassi skillfully correlates the veglia to the rites of passage and family values of an agrarian society. Although the impact of mass media and other factors has tended to weaken the tradition, even today Tuscan children are taught to behave and adolescents are guided along the conventional path to adulthood, courtship, and marriage through veglia folklore. This is the first work to deal systematically with Tuscan folklore from a semiotic and structural viewpoint and to examine the veglia as a means of handing down traditional values. It is important not only for its careful, detailed description but also for its rigorous methodology and theoretical richness.


Poor Cecco

Poor Cecco

Author: Margery Williams Bianco

Publisher: Courier Corporation

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 0486492265

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Originally published: New York: George H. Doran Co., 1925.


When Toys Come Alive

When Toys Come Alive

Author: Lois R. Kuznets

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 1994-01-01

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 9780300056457

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In this work the author studies the role of toy characters in works ranging from older classics such as Pinocchio and Winnie the Pooh to modern texts such as The Mouse and his Child and the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes science fiction with robots and cyborgs.


Graziella

Graziella

Author: Alphonse de Lamartine

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2018-11-13

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13: 1452957924

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In its first modern translation, a novel-cum-memoir of a Frenchman’s erotic awakening in Italy by a preeminent writer of the Romantic period In 1812 Alphonse de Lamartine, a young man of means, traveled through southern Italy, where, during a sojourn in Naples, he fell in love with a young woman who worked in a cigar factory—and whose death after he returned to France would haunt him throughout his writing life. Graziella, Lamartine called this lost girl in his poetry and memoirs—and also in Graziella, a novel that closely follows the story of his own romance. “When I was eighteen,” the narrator begins, as if penning his memoir, “my family entrusted me to the care of a relative whose business affairs called her to Tuscany.” The tale that unfolds, of the young man’s amorous experiences amid the natural grandeur and subtle splendors of the Italian countryside, is one of the finest works of fiction in the French Romantic tradition, a bildungsroman that is also a melancholy portrait of the artist as a young man discovering the muse who would both inspire and elude him. Remarkable for its contemplative prose, its dreamy passions and seductive drawing of the Italian landscape, and its place in the Romantic canon, Graziella is a timeless portrait of love, chronicling the remorse and the misguided ideals of youth that find their expression, if not their amends, in art.


Written for Children

Written for Children

Author: John Rowe Townsend

Publisher: Scarecrow Press

Published: 1996-05-01

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 1461731046

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This revised and updated edition provides children's and young adult librarians, teachers, literature classes, and library school classes with an authoritative history and analysis of the best British and American children's literature through 1994, with a new 2003 postscript including such recent phenomenons as J.K.Rowling and Philip Pullman. Written for Children traces the development of children's literature from its origins through the beginnings of the multimedia revolution. In effortless and entertaining style, Townsend, a world-renowned authority in the field, examines the changing attitudes toward children and their literature and analyzes the various strands that make up this important field. While examining many well-known American classics, Townsend also looks at British works that American audiences may have overlooked. With illustrations and bibliography.