English Tales Research Articles

Anonymous English Poem of the 14th century The King of Tars: Xenophobia as a Modality of the Plot and Language Motives

This article is a pilot study of the content features of the English tale of chivalry King of Tarsus and a description of the main features of its poetics. To this day the epic poem remains in the status of underestimated by English-speaking literary critics and unfamiliar to Russian linguists. One of the purposes of the article is to highlight the most striking features of the plot and language of the text, which could further attract some researchers. Particular attention is paid to the ways of solving the ideological task that the anonymous author faced, those plot and verbal motives that materialized the opposition of the Saracens to the Christians. It involves the creation of images of the Saracens with help of exotic nominations, animalistic speech description and black color symbolization to express their "pagan" faith. The main result of the study is defining the text's focus on inciting xenophobia among English readers. The identification of symmetry as the organizing structural principle of this text is another result of the research.

Lady Delacour’s Electioneering Rage

This essay examines Lady Delacour’s electioneering in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801). Situating Lady Delacour’s political participation in the history of the eighteenth-century electoral system and the settler politics of the Edgeworth family, it suggests that Edgeworth’s first English tale offers a model for women’s limited political participation in response to women’s radical and revolutionary action at the end of the eighteenth century. The essay uses electoral material culture—the cockades and ribbons Lady Delacour wears, distributes, and draws—to spotlight how Edgeworth encouraged landowning women to perform, from a secondary and subordinate position, the electoral work that served the gender and class hierarchies underpinning the political systems across the United Kingdom.

ON THE PROBLEM OF RENDERING RUDYARD KIPLING’S INDIVIDUAL STYLE IN TRANSLATION

The article is dedicated to the study of the translating specificity( R.Kipling’s prose into Russian. The research is aimed at defining the peculiarities of Rudyard Kipling’s individual style revealed in his famous literary tales. The objective of the research is to outline possible difficulties in translating R. Kipling’s tales and ways of overcoming those problems by employing translation techniques. The research is carried out on the basis of the original English tales and their translations into Russian. By means of comparative analysis the most adequate translation variants and successful techniques are selected. The main criteria of qualified translation are adequacy, faithfulness and equivalence. The conclusion is drawn that the main strategies of translation are the strategy of the communicatively relevant translation and the translation of re-addressing. The main translation techniques at work, as it has been experimentally discovered, are correspondingly replacement and descriptive translation. The main challenges for translators have proved to be stylistic devices, occasional words, blends, as well as cases of sound-imitation and sequence of non-sequence. The original texts abound in the author’s coinages, most of which were masterfully rendered by translators. The quantitative parameters of the strategies distribution translation, tactics and techniques have revealed the typological commonness of the operations employed. There has been observed the correlation of the technique of de-metaphorization and the tactic of linguistic and cultural adaptation. The perspective of the study of the variability of strategies, tactics and techniques in translating R. Kipling’s prose into different languages is seen in researching the distinctive parameters of the translation strategies and tactics and in performing comparative analysis on the basis of other translation languages at work.

The Glastonbury Thorn in Vernacular Christianity and Popular Tradition

This article considers the most famous English sacred tree, the Glastonbury Thorn, which has a special place in vernacular Christianity and popular folklore. It was part of the pilgrimage site at Glastonbury during the Middle Ages and after the Reformation, Puritan soldiers chopped it down during the Civil War (1642-1651). However, elaborate folklore concerning the Thorn developed between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. according to these tales, Jesus came to Britain with his mother's uncle, Joseph of Arimathea, who planted the Glastonbury Thorn. The Thorn is considered miraculous, as it flowers twice yearly, with the second flowering in winter at Christmas. It also plays multiple roles in England's past and present. For example, all Christian traditions that assert that Jesus walked on soil other than that of the Middle East are engaged in the sacralization of territory, the transformation of the periphery into the center. English tales that claim Jesus visited Somerset and Cornwall bestow upon England the status of a 'Holy Land'. Further, the Thorn is part of the web of connections linking Glastonbury with the English Crown. This article considers the symbolism of the Glastonbury Thorn and assembleshistorical accounts, folklore, and popular cultural practices to investigate its historical importance and its contemporary significance.

Medieval Romance and Material Culture ed. by Nicholas Perkins (review)

NICHOLAS PERKINS, ed., Medieval Romance and Material Culture. Studies in Medieval Romance, Vol. 18. Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2015. Pp. xiv, 285. isbn: 978-1- 84384-390-0. $99.As the title signals, these fifteen essays highlight the reciprocal relationship between romance and material culture. Focusing on romances circulating in Britain and Ireland from the twelfth to sixteenth centuries, the volume emphasizes English tales yet also treats French and Scottish works, a lai, and the Victorian reception of a fifteenth-century compilation. Contributors emphasize diverse aspects of material culture: many consider manuscripts; others examine objects such as ivory caskets, bodies, relics, or images. The varied perspectives bring thematic breadth: physical space, gender, manuscript culture, and courtly pastimes figure prominently, and essays often evoke questions of identity. This scope results in a rich collection of value to a wide audience of scholars.Perkins opens the volume with an essay that serves as an introduction and a study of The Erle of Tolous. He demonstrates how reading oaths and exchange materially adds layers of complexity. After discussing the book's history and reception, Perkins concludes with summaries of the collection's articles. He also explains his rationale for the sequence of essays, beginning with the treatment of physical space and then moving to cooperation, exchange, and conflict; the formal and textual shape of romance; other media; and adaptation and reception.For this review, I will group articles more broadly, with one set dealing with intra- and extra-textual material objects, and the second centering on manuscripts. The first category includes most essays, including Perkins.' Elliot Kendall focuses on images of exchange, conflict, and cooperation in The Avowying of Arthur, arguing that cooperation is complex, adaptable, and benefits both the knight who cooperates and the community. Megan G. Leitch highlights conflict, analyzing the role of chess, especially in the Stanzaic Guy of Warwick and Caxton's The Foure Sonnes of Aymon, both of which reveal the political and social implications of homicide in high-stakes chess matches.Physical space and significant objects within texts or in the outside world are central in the articles by Rosalind Field, Siobhan Bly Calkin, Neil Cartlidge, Anna Caughey, and Richard Allen Rouse. Field investigates objects and gifts at courts in Brittany and Ireland in the Romance of Horn, linking material culture to emotional regimes. Calkin studies relics and images in The Sege of Melayne and Sir Ferumbras, showing the material power of devotional objects. Cartlidge explores the choice of Ireland as a setting in the Lai de Melion, contending that the werewolf 's transformations give concrete form to instability in political and ethnic identities. …

Linguistic and Cognitive Characteristics of the Composition of the Text of J.K. Rowling's English Tales

This article focuses on linguistic and cognitive characteristics inherent in the composition of the English postmodern tales written by J.K. Rowling. The composition of the text is viewed as linguistic and cognitive construal that integrates compositional plot structure, compositional meaning structure, linguistic and stylistic means of their actualization in the text. The content of the text is organized as a specific configuration of compositional plot blocks reflecting similar topics of textual situations. The coherence and cohesion of compositional plot blocks are provided by the compositional devices which perform text building and text forming functions. Compositional meaning structure is revealed via reconstruction of the conceptual metaphoric and metonymic schemas embodied in compositional plot blocks. The key meaning is represented by the megametaphor LIFE IS THE CHOICE OF A PATH, which in the text unfolds into a number of conceptual metaphors and metonymies. The peculiarities of representation of compositional plot structure and compositional meaning structure are explained through the analysis of corresponding linguistic and stylistic means and types of narration. Keywords : Composition, Linguo-cognitive construal, Compositional plot structure, Compositional meaning structure, Compositional plot blocks, Conceptual megametaphor

T. Matthew N. McCabe Gower’s Vulgar Tongue: Ovid, Lay Religion, and English Poetry in the Confessio AmantisGower’s Vulgar Tongue: Ovid, Lay Religion, and English Poetry in the Confessio Amantis. T. Matthew N. McCabe. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2011. Pp. vi+258.

<i>T. Matthew N. McCabe</i> Gower’s Vulgar Tongue: Ovid, Lay Religion, and English Poetry in the <i>Confessio Amantis</i><i>Gower’s Vulgar Tongue: Ovid, Lay Religion, and English Poetry in the <i>Confessio Amantis</i></i>. T. Matthew N. McCabe. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2011. Pp. vi+258.

Interview with Ben Okri

Introduction First, let me express my deep gratitude to you for taking time out of your busy schedule and the public demands made upon so celebrated a writer to talk to a reader who finds your works--be they poetic, dramatic, or prose--intriguing and compelling. I can well understand why the International Pen Club has you as their vice-president. Secondly, I must tell you that I would like to use this interview as the opening piece in a monograph of your works that 1 hope to publish shortly, containing articles by myself and also those by some of my postgraduate students at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. Rosemary Gray: I'd like to begin by asking you to respond to my perception that throughout your oeuvre there seems to me to be a single guiding principle, a deeply embedded philosophical credo, if you like. Of course I could be mistaken, being driven in my reading of your work by my own horizons of expectation (to borrow a term from Robert Jauss). In other words, I may be being misled by my own reception aesthetics. The principle I refer to is, I believe, nowhere better expressed than towards the end of Songs of Enchantment when, from the silence of unblindedness, Azaro's father, in conversation with his son, a spirit-child, an abiku, is moved to muse that [t]he light comes out of the darkness. (1993:287) This is a catalyst for two other questions and for a request I should like to make, but perhaps you'd like to respond to my contention about your guiding principle before I pose the two questions that arise out of this one. Am I on the right track in attributing an innate optimism to you? Ben Okri: No, I wouldn't call it optimism so much as realism. But, it is important how one defines realism. Realism takes in what is seen, felt, touched; what is unknown and unseen. The primordial African spirit views reality from a wider spectrum [than the Western one]. It is informed by the metaphysical sense embedded in all the great traditions, but particularly in the African tradition. The African world view takes in the hierarchy of metaphysical beings which, in turn, leads to a number of essential questions: What constitutes one's reality? Is one's reality true only for that individual? Isn't our reality limited to what we are taught to see? A piano with only five keys is a reality. But, if we include all the keys, the white keys and the black keys, this is a different reality. So reality depends on our cultural perception of the keyboard of life. Using the full keyboard, Azaro's father discovered a new perception of fundamental questions, especially the question of what constitutes the nature of reality. Is it outside oneself or fatally linked to human sensibilities? How does one construct reality? One cannot truthfully tell an African tale according to Jane Austen's reality or an early-nineteenth-century English tale according to an African reality. Dialogue with the West is thus difficult because reality is not universal. R.G.: Is there an element of the Platonic notion of the and the here? B.O.: Yes, but also the Scandinavian concept of reality. I can draw it for you. [This Okri did in my copy of Starbook. R.G.: Although the author has himself emphasised the realistic dimensions of his work, this realism must be seen to embrace the ancestors, myths and legends, which are an integral part of the real world, of urban life and of rural life. Local beliefs are thus part of the real world, not parallel with, but contiguous to it. Elsewhere, I have referred to Okri's spirit-in-life beings as leading sentient double lives (see The English Academy Review 26(1) May 2009: 45). In Starbook, Okri states: Only in light can truth be found.... Beyond is where it really begins (2007: 118), which is itself an effective synopsis of what he writes in Birds of Heaven (1996: 12-13): The greatest inspiration, the most sublime ideas of living that have come down to humanity come from a higher realm, a happier realm, a place of pure dreams, a heaven of blessed notions. …

‘What shall these bowes do?’: The Gift and Its Violence in A Gest of Robyn Hode

This essay proposes that gift exchange in Middle English tales of outlawry serves to negotiate problems of violence and social conflict endemic to late medieval England. Repeated scenes of giving reaffirm ‘fellowship’ as an oft-noted ideal of this literature, but gifts also work as a form of symbolic violence, suggesting that coercion is the not-so-hidden basis of community here. Seemingly part and parcel of the outlaw hero’s rebellious appeal, his generosity turns out to serve a surprisingly conservative function. Yet this conservative message is not strictly a matter of feudal nostalgia. In fact, reading the logic of the gift in these tales allows us to move beyond the long-standing debate over their economic ideology. Neither purely feudal nor mercantile in their function, the outlaw’s gifts constitute a form of violence whose appeal lies precisely in its forceful resolution of conflicting economic and social interests. The relatively popular A Gest of Robyn Hode (after 1450) provides the clearest example of how generosity intersects in outlaw literature with anxieties about violence and social order. Like its analogues, the Gest testifies to the survival of the gift as a fantasy of order in an emergently modern world.

Medieval Go-Betweens and Chaucer's Pandarus. Gretchen Mieszkowski . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Pp. xi+218.

<i>Medieval Go-Betweens and Chaucer's Pandarus</i>. Gretchen Mieszkowski . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Pp. xi+218.

"Giants Have Trampled the Earth": Colonialism and the English Tale in Samuel Selvon's Turn Again Tiger

"Giants Have Trampled the Earth": Colonialism and the English Tale in Samuel Selvon's Turn Again Tiger

Robert Henryson and the Matter of Multilingualism

Medieval multilingualism can be a gaudy affair. It can feature so promi- nently in the design and rhetoric of a work that it does not simply cap- ture a reader's attention but instead serves, as much as love or virtue or political order, as one of that work's central thematic and organizing principles. Without multilingualism, Piers Plowman would certainly be difficult to imagine. Latin supplies quotations, technical words, and a critical subtext that advance the poem's plot, meditation on concepts like salvation, and even the depiction of characters like Anima, who move into and out of Latin in conversationally strategic ways. This movement itself advances one of the poem's most prominent topics: the dynamics between an authoritative culture (social as well as religious) that is medi- ated by Latin and a popular culture mediated by English and focused on challenging inherited notions of piety, language, and politics. In many ways, through its use of multilingualism Piers Plowman precociously depicts a world in which English has come to displace Latin's status as a High Language in medieval England's diglossia, a world that would not in fact come into sociolinguistic existence for another 300 years or so. And the importance of multilingualism to Piers Plowman was not lost on the scribes who transmitted the text. They gave particular attention to maintaining a consistent, restrained format throughout the tradition, and among the features they maintained was the highlighting of Latin passages, whether through rubrication or underscoring in red. John Gower's works offer similarly gaudy examples of multilingualism. Gower's entire career is of course multilingual, since he wrote successively in Latin and French as well as English, but, more narrowly, the Confessio Amantis offers a widely known and discussed interplay of Latin and English at several compositional levels. The individual English tales are framed by Latin verses, while a Latin commentary develops more fully the poem's allusions, rhetorical devices, and ethics. As with the manuscripts of Piers Plowman, those of the Confessio foreground the work's multilingual na- ture by setting off and rubricating much of the Latin text, rendering the interplay of Latin and English a particularly prominent feature of one of the most deluxe manuscript traditions of late-medieval England. Gower

Transmogrification or Forvandling?

Within a decade appeared two appraised translations of the Latin poet Ovid's Metamorphoses: the English Tales from Ovid by Ted Hughes, and the Danish Ovids forvandlinger by Otto Steen Due. Though in general true to Ovid's text, the two translations are markedly different, reflecting different traditions and different aims. Whereas Hughes centres on stories and their symbolic value, Due is more bent upon transmitting the original perspective and style of the original. In doing this, varied approaches are employed by both translators. Abridgements and additions are made, more or less modernized expressions used, and central issues – such as playfulness – conveyed or reinvented. Still, the substantially different approaches lie beneath and are traced into minor details of description and narration.

The identification and protection of cultural heritage during the Iraq conflict: A peculiarly English tale

The author offers us a first hand account of his extraordinary and unexpected duties during the second Iraq war. This is history, heritage, regulation and perhaps even legislation in the making.

Twice Upon a Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale (review)

Reviewed by: Twice Upon a Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale Lisette Luton (bio) Twice Upon a Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale. By Elizabeth Wanning Harries. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2001 In this provocative study of the origins of contemporary notions about fairy tales as an extension of the oral tradition, Elizabeth Wanning Harries flips current fairy-tale theory on its head. Addressing those who believe that the fairy tales of Perrault, the brothers Grimm, and others were transcriptions of ancient tales passed down orally by illiterate peasants, Harries immediately puts the reader on shaky ground by maintaining that "the history of fairy tales is not primarily a history of oral transmission but rather a history of print" (4). In the introduction, Harries begins by looking at ways in which fairy tales are usually defined, debunking popular myths about fairy tales along the way. For example, although the term fairy tale suggests that these stories are about fairies, Harries shows that most fairy tales do not actually include fairies. Additionally, fairy tales have long been thought of primarily as "children's literature"; Harries shows this to be a misconception. Chapter 1 deals with the canonization of fairy tales. Since canonization necessarily involves decisions regarding what to leave in and what to leave out, exclusions from the literary canon can be seen as indicative of various social and literary issues of the time period in which the exclusions occur. Harries points out that although most of the writers of fairy tales in the 1690s were women, only Perrault's tales have remained within the canon. Harries theorizes that Perrault's fairy tales were considered authentic because they claimed to be transcriptions of peasant storytelling and they were written in a simplistic way, reminiscent of the "folk." The Grimms, the abbé de Villiers, and C. A. Walckenaer propagated this image by praising Perrault for his naive style that they believed imitated or suggested the style of the oral, folk storyteller. In the case of Villiers, he not only praised Perrault but also dismissed the fairy tales written by women writers such as D'Aulnoy because of their length and complexity. I believe that the exclusion of women writers of fairy tales from the literary canon has less to do with Villiers' assessment of them than with a general gender bias that has occurred in the history of French literature. At a time when women writers were relegated to literary salons, most of the seventeenth-century fairy tales were written by women, yet only Perrault's have been canonized. In chapter 2, Harries shows impressive research as she explains how the image of the storyteller came to be associated with the peasant nursemaid "raconteuse" symbolized by "Mother Goose." She explores the work of several women fairy-tale writers of the 1690s whom she refers to as "conteuses." These include D'Aulnoy, Murat, and Lhéritier. She stresses that the conteuses chose to portray a different kind of orality from the peasant storyteller of Perrault. They placed their fairy tales in the context of the literary salon, making them the domain of educated upper-class nobles who told stories to amuse one another. [End Page 51] While Perrault claims to have taken his stories directly from the oral tradition, Harries demonstrates that he may have been influenced by the stories of the conteuses who actually published several years earlier than Perrault. The conteuses rarely made any reference to the peasant oral tradition, but instead admitted to have taken some of their stories from sixteenth-century texts by Straparola and early seventeenth-century texts by Basile, both written sources. Chapter 3 can be summed up by Harries' statement: "The history of the fairy tale in England is largely a history of translation" (80). The works of the Grimms, Perrrault, Andersen, and others were translated and circulated around England. For example, Perrault's "Little Red Riding Hood" and "Puss in Boots" were popular. The few truly English tales would include "Tom Thumb" and "Jack the Giant Killer." A curious phenomenon occurred somewhere along the way. Some of these tales translated from other languages came to be thought...

Landscape With Faces

JOHN HEARNE. There are, in fiction, a few 'complete' characters: people about whom a writer tells you all you need to know. There are, equally, in painting, a few faces in which the whole record of a life's passion and experience is not only caught but prophesied. But a country, any good country, remains essentially undiscovered for all time. It replenishes and recreates itself from all human endeavour - even from the endeavour of those who try to define it. We can seek only for a sort of truth, insufficient but valid like our declarations of love, rather than a precise catalogue of qualities. Always, we are defeated, in the quest for any final response by the ceaseless and creative dialogues between our memory and the land itself on which we are only guests. Anyone who sets out to commit his country to print must work within the limits defined by Virginia's Captain John Smith. As geography without history, he wrote, more than three centuries ago, seemeth a carkasse without motion, so history without geography wandreth as a vagrant without certain habitation. . If you wish to understand us in Jamaica, you must also understand that most Jamaicans would accept John Smith's definition of the meaning of a place. Perhaps all of us in the New World are informed by this common humility: that we all belong to the new found land we seized and exploited with such desperate temerity. Certainly, most people between Alaska and Argentina who have known something like a history seem to endure this half-ecstatic ecstasy of wanting to grasp and realise the whole earth; seem to move towards a fulfilment that the peoples of Europe and Asia or Africa have achieved these many thousand years. I don't know why this should be so, and the fulfilment spoken of is not only political: it contains also, a confidence, as yet lacking, of possession by the whole man. Speaking to his own parish of the Americas, Stephen Vincent Benet said: They tried to fit you with an English song And clip your speech into the English tale But even from the first the words went wrong The catbird pecked away the nightingale ...... ........ They planted England with a stubborn trust But the cleft dust was never English dust. For England read any of the great countries or cultures from three continents whose unreturned prodigals we are. And Jamaica, although itself, is only an island, 'a part of the maine: a small vivid piece of the great American experience that began one October morning over five hundred and fifty years ago. There is less time between Columbus' first landfall and now, than between the collapse of Rome's Western Empire and the crowning of the first French King. All the same, five hundred and fifty years is a respectable continuity, and Jamaica, which Columbus discovered less than two years after the Santa Maria hove to off Watling Island in the Bahamas, has had Western civic government without a break since 1509. That is, our first township, with all the administrative and ecclesiastical and commercial institutions that go to make a European town, was built in the same year Henry VIII came to the English throne, a century before Pocohontas saved Captain John Smith from execution, over three generations before the first Founding Father stepped from a longboat on to Plymouth Rock. But this continuity of ordered, familiar, European civilization was first built on a base of genocide without any parallel in the records of man. Since prehistory, when Cro-Magnon clashed with Neanderthal, there has been nothing with which we can compare the destruction of the aboriginal, Arawak Indians of the major Caribbean islands - Puerto Rico, Hispaniola, Cuba and Jamaica by the Spaniards. A demon so horrible, so inexplicable, so inaccessible to any forms of inquiry we now have seems to have entered quite ordinary fathers and descent sons of Castille, Andalusia, Aragon and, soft Valencia, so that even now in the West Indies we try to pretend that the representatives of fifteen hundred years of Christ found an unpeopled garden. …

Differences in Content and Outlook between English Folk Rhymes and Tales

EVEN a cursory glance at folk rhymes and folktales tells us that there are major differences between the two: the rhymes tend to speak about everyday people afid occurrences, while the tales tend to speak about special people and extraordinary occurrences; rhymes tend to be realistic, while the tales tend to be fantastic. A closer examination reveals that these two genres contain many more important points of contrast in both their content and their outlook, and that, in fact, the differences are far more profound than the similarities. This study investigates eight hundred and fifty English folk rhymes (nursery rhymes) and ninety-seven English folktales.' Only traditional tales are used, so that the rhymes and the tales have both passed through the oral stage. And, since the folk rhymes are English, only English tales are used, to avoid skewing the data because of possible idiosyncracies of national traditions. The corpus of tales includes Mdrchen, legends, animal tales, etiological tales, drolls, cumulative tales, and nonsense tales. Although more tales are Mdrchen than any other type, no attempt has been made to restrict the study solely to Mdrchen, because there is no indication that this type of tale was kept separate from the other types in the telling. The findings of this study would, of course, appear even more striking were Mdrchen alone considered. A significant number of English rhymes and tales, then, are examined in detail; the differences in content and outlook are discussed below, and an explanation for these differences is posited. Let us consider first the content of the rhymes and the tales. In his study of English ballads and tales, Shuldiner reports 'a tendency toward complementary distribution of subject matter.'2 This same tendency is evident in the content of the English folk rhymes and tales, as we shall see. When we begin with the characters, we note that the majority of people in the rhymes are common folk like lazy Elsie Marley, Old Mother Hubbard, Jack and Jill, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. A few kings and queens appear, but, like the ordinary folk, they are portrayed doing very commonplace things: Old King Cole smokes his pipe and listens to music, the Queen of Hearts is baking tarts, while good King Arthur makes a bag-pudding. These are not special people; whether common or royal, they lead mundane lives. The main characters in the tales, on the other hand, are just the opposite. They may be aristocratic-and there certainly are many more aristocrats in the tales than in the rhymes-or they may be common, but in either case they are extraordinary people who have incredible experiences. They are, as Liithi says, 'heaven's favourites.'3 Both prince and commoner journey to the ends of the earth (the prince in 'The King of England and His Three Sons' and the poor girl in 'The Well of the World's End'); others travel to giantland or fairyland ('Jack and the Beanstalk' and 'Tamlane'); still others experience a transformation (Princess Margaret is turned into a dragon in 'The Laidly Worm of Spindleston Heugh'). No matter what may befall these characters, we know it will be marvellous and extraordinary, for here we are not dealing with run-of-the-mill people. Emphasizing the ordinariness of the characters in the rhymes are the numerous

Medieval Comic Tales

French tales, translated by Peter Rickard Spanish tales, translated by Alan Deyermond English tales, translated by Derek Brewer Italian tales, translated by Derek Brewer German tales, translated by David Blamires Dutch tales, translated by David Johnson Medieval Latin tales, translated by Michael Lapidge.

Relationship between Ethnic Group Attitudes Toward Dialect and Comprehension of Dialect Folktales

The effects of ethnic group attitudes toward dialect upon comprehension of dialect folktales were studied in third graders. It was predicted that black children would like folktales in black English (BE) better than the same folktales in standard English (SE) and better than other folktales in Hawaiian Pidgin or Cajun dialect. A result of this preference was predicted to be heightened comprehension of black English tales. Children with other ethnic backgrounds were expected to favor folktales in SE over those in Pidgin, Cajun, or BE. Results supported the predictions in both listening and reading conditions with one exception: the black children did not show elevated liking or comprehension in response to reading BE. BERNSTEIN (1), Groff (7), Healy (8, 9), and Shnayer (13) have shown that children's attitudes can determine success in reading. In their studies, children who developed favorable attitudes toward reading as an activity read bet ter and read more books than did children with unfavorable attitudes. In addition, attitude influ enced the comprehension of specific reading se lections. If the children read a story in a content area they liked, they were likely to comprehend it well. If they read story content they did not like, their comprehension tended to suffer. The effect of attitude on comprehension sug gested a further investigation. If favorably evalu ated story content facilitates comprehension, it was reasoned that favorably evaluated dialect could similarly do so. This possibility had some intuitive attractiveness because speakers of favor ably evaluated dialects seem to elicit more com prehension from their listeners. However, this effectiveness might only be seeming, not real. In addition, even if the effect did exist for oral language, it might not exist for written text. Thus an experiment was needed to test the possible facilitating effects of attitude toward dialect upon comprehension. The first step in designing the experiment was the choice of an appropriate dialect, used fre quently enough to make comprehension easy for listeners who did not speak it themselves. It also had to be a dialect toward which an identifiable group of children would have favorable attitudes.

Book Review: Old English Tales Retold

Book Review: Old English Tales Retold