Myths and Hero Tales
Myths and Hero Tales

Author: Agnes Regan Perkins

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 1997-11-25

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 0313008108

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This one-stop cross-cultural selective guide to recent retellings of myths and hero tales for children and young adults will enable teachers and library media specialists to select comparative myths and tales from various, mostly non-European cultures. The focus is on stories from Native America, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Central and South America, and Oceania. The Guide contains extensively annotated entries on 189 books of retellings of myths and hero tales, both ancient and modern, from around the world published between 1985 and 1996. Represented are 1,455 stories suitable for use with young people from mid-elementary through high school. The entries, arranged alphabetically by writer, contain complete bibliographic data, age and grade levels, and evaluative annotations. Seven indexes—title, author, illustrator, culture, story type, name, and grade level—make searching easy. The story type index will enable teachers to select comparative myths and tales from different cultures on more than 50 types of myths and hero tales. Among the many myth types cited are origin of human beings and the world, comparative social customs and rituals, natural and heavenly phenomena, animal appearance and behavior, searches and quests, and tricksters. Among the hero tale types are fools and buffoons, kings and queens, warriors, monster slayers, important female figures, magicians, voyagers and adventurers, and spiritual leaders. The Guide concludes with a bibliography of retellings published earlier that have come to be considered standard works.

Integrating Strangers
Integrating Strangers

Author: Anaïs Ménard

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2023-04-14

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 1800738412

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Drawing on an ethnography of Sherbro coastal communities in Sierra Leone, this book analyses the politics and practice of identity through the lens of the reciprocal relations that exist between socio-ethnic groups. Anaïs Ménard examines the implications of the social arrangement that binds landlords and strangers in a frontier region, the Freetown Peninsula, characterized by high degrees of individual mobility and social interactions. She showcases the processes by which Sherbro identity emerged as a flexible category of practice, allowing individuals the possibility to claim multiple origins and perform ethnic crossovers while remaining Sherbro.

Jamaican Song and Story. Annancy stories, digging sings, ring tunes, and dancing tunes
Jamaican Song and Story. Annancy stories, digging sings, ring tunes, and dancing tunes

Author: Various

Publisher: Good Press

Published: 2023-10-05

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13:

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Jamaican Song and Story is an anthology that celebrates the vibrant tapestry of Jamaican folklore, weaving together an array of Annancy stories, digging sings, ring tunes, and dancing tunes. This collection embodies the rich cultural heritage and literary diversity of the island, presenting a wide range of literary styles from oral traditions to written narratives. The inclusion of standout pieces within this compilation underscores the anthology's significant role in highlighting the folklore's intricate dynamics and its influence on the literary context of Jamaican culture. The diverse literary forms included serve to illuminate the myriad ways in which Jamaican folklore continues to enrich the global literary landscape. The anthology brings together works by various contributors, including notable editors such as Alice Werner, Lucy Etheldred Broadwood, and Charles S. Myers. These editors and contributing authors, with their diverse backgrounds, collectively weave a narrative that aligns with significant historical, cultural, and literary movements. Their collective contributions are pivotal in presenting a cohesive exploration of Jamaican folklore, showcasing how these stories, songs, and tunes have shaped, and been shaped by, the cultural and historical contexts of Jamaica. The melding of these varied voices offers readers a nuanced understanding of the themes explored within the anthology. Jamaican Song and Story invites readers to immerse themselves in the richness of Jamaican folklore, providing a unique opportunity to explore the island's cultural heritage through its songs and stories. This anthology is recommended for those interested in the educational value of folk traditions, the breadth of insights these traditions offer into Jamaican culture, and the dialogue fostered between the different authors' works. Readers will find this collection a treasure trove of cultural wisdom, narrative ingenuity, and musical vibrancy, offering a profound understanding of Jamaica's literary and cultural landscapes.

The Rude Story of English
The Rude Story of English

Author: Tom Howell

Publisher: McClelland & Stewart

Published: 2013-11-05

Total Pages: 162

ISBN-13: 0771039875

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There are only two problems with the story of the English language: one, no hero. Two, not rude enough. In The Rude Story of English, recovering lexicographer Tom Howell swiftly remedies these and gives us a rousing account of our language – without all the boring bits and with all the interesting parts kept in – and reveals English’s boisterous, at times obnoxious, character. From a haphazard beginning in 449 AD, when a legendary, fearsome Germanic warrior named Hengest tripped and fell onto British shores, the real story of English has been rife with accident, physical comedy, phallic monuments, rude behaviour, dubious facts, and an alarming quantity of poetry written by lawyers. Across vast distances of space and time, from the language’s origins to its fast-approaching retirement, a moody and miraculously long-lived Hengest voyages to the pubs of Chaucer’s London, aboard pirate ships in the north Atlantic, to plantations in Barbados, bookstores in Jamaica, the chilly inlet of Quidi Vidi, Newfoundland, a private men’s club in Australia, and beyond. Part Monty Python sketch, part Oxford English Dictionary, The Rude Story of English displays an exuberant love of language and a sharp, anti-authoritarian sense of humour. Entertaining and informative, it looks at English through its most uncomfortable, colourful, and off-putting parts, chronicling the story of the language as it has never been told before.

Literatures in African Languages
Literatures in African Languages

Author: B. W. Andrzejewski

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1985-11-21

Total Pages: 678

ISBN-13: 0521256461

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Although African literatures in English and French are widely known outside Africa, those in the African languages themselves have not received comparable attention. In this book a number have been selected for survey by fourteen specialist writers, providing the reader with an introduction to this very wide field and a body of reference material which includes extensive bibliographies and biographical information on African authors. Theoretical issues such as genre divisions are discussed in the essays and the historical, social and political forces at work in the creation and reception of African literature are examined. Literature is treated as an art whose medium is language, so that both the oral and written forms are encompassed. This book will be of value not only to readers concerned with the cultures of Africa but to all those with an interest in the literary phenomena of the world in general.

Memories of the Slave Trade
Memories of the Slave Trade

Author: Rosalind Shaw

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2020-04-04

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 022676446X

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How is the slave trade remembered in West Africa? In a work that challenges recurring claims that Africans felt (and still feel) no sense of moral responsibility concerning the sale of slaves, Rosalind Shaw traces memories of the slave trade in Temne-speaking communities in Sierra Leone. While the slave-trading past is rarely remembered in explicit verbal accounts, it is often made vividly present in such forms as rogue spirits, ritual specialists' visions, and the imagery of divination techniques. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and archival research, Shaw argues that memories of the slave trade have shaped (and been reshaped by) experiences of colonialism, postcolonialism, and the country's ten-year rebel war. Thus money and commodities, for instance, are often linked to an invisible city of witches whose affluence was built on the theft of human lives. These ritual and visionary memories make hitherto invisible realities manifest, forming a prism through which past and present mutually configure each other.

Freeman's: Family
Freeman's: Family

Author: John Freeman

Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Published: 2016-08-02

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 0802190448

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A diverse anthology of new fiction, essays, poetry, and photography exploring the subject of family from this “illustrious new literary journal” (Vogue.com). Following his acclaimed debut issue of collected writing on the theme of “Arrival,” the renowned editor and critic John Freeman circles a topic of constantly shifting definitions and endless fascination for writers: family. In an essay called “Crossroads,” Aminatta Forna muses on the legacy of slavery as she settles her family in Washington, DC—a place where she is routinely accused of cutting in line when she stands next to her white husband. Award-winning novelist Claire Vaye Watkins delivers a stunning portrait of a woman in the throes of postpartum depression. Booker Prize winner Marlon James takes the focus off absent fathers to write about his mother, who calls to sing him happy birthday every year. Novelist Claire Messud’s writes of the two four-legged tyrants in her home; Sandra Cisneros muses about her extended family of past lovers; and Aleksandar Hemon tells the story of his uncle’s desperate attempt to remain a communist despite decades in the Soviet gulag. With outstanding, never-before-published pieces of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from literary heavyweights and up-and-coming writers alike, Freeman’s: Family collects the most amusing, heartbreaking, and probing stories about family life emerging today.