In Historical Roots of the Wondertale (Indiana University Press), Propp compares folktale structures and content to rituals and customs of aboriginal societies from around the world and with people who were the first to envision religion and myth. This book is freely available as an Open Access monograph.
Recent Releases
Custom Made Woman (The University of North Carolina Press) tells the story of Grammy-nominated old-time and bluegrass musician Alice Gerrard through the music, the folk festivals, the kids, and the relationships—both personal and professional—that defined her storied life and career.
In Never-Ending Tales (Princeton University Press), AFS Fellow Jack Zipes presents more than two dozen stories addressing "the Jewish Question." Humorous and bittersweet, and filled with ironic reversals, these are stories of fantasy, magic, and transformation.
Public Humanities (Michigan State University Press) examines historical and contemporary sites of education and pedagogy, challenges dominant narratives about certain symbolic sites in the U.S. and across the Americas, highlights the struggle of marginalized communities, and features public humanities projects that address themes relating to place and environment.
Angalkut/Shamans in Yup’ik Oral Tradition (University of Alaska Press) collects over thirty years’ worth of Yup’ik angalkut stories and is the first book devoted exclusively to these shamans and their roles in Yup’ik life.
Folklorist Dorothy Noyes teams up with political scientist Tobias Wille to publish Exemplarity in Global Politics (Bristol University Press)—a volume that draws on folkloristic theories to give a new account of a mechanism that is celebrated in liberal discourse but trickier in practice: the performance and uptake of examples.
Deevara Chittara (Prism Books) is a visual documentation of Chittara, a folk art tradition kept alive by the women of the Deevaru community in the Malenadu region of Karnataka state, India.
Four timely articles from JAF: A Global Quarterly are free to access through the end of this month.
The latest issue of Folklorica, the journal of the Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Folklore Association, has been released. All content of Folklorica is freely available.
Largely humorous, sometimes hilarious, often centered on encounters with Euro-American society and technology, the stories in Making Each Other Laugh (University of Oklahoma Press) bear witness to the continuing vitality of Native American oral traditions.