Folk Epic Research Articles

Identification and Literary Analysis of the Selected Folk Literature in the Province of Capiz, Philippines

The Philippines, a treasury of oral folk epics and particularly folk songs, gives us opportunities to research them in transition, which implies documenting and introducing them to a wider audience (Biclar, 2014). Capiz is the capital of folk songs and folk dances in Western Visayas. It is a province in Panay Island which has a distinctive and astonishing folk literature existing, but the dilemma is, writings were not all recorded and compiled. The study identified and analyzed the selected folk literature in the province. It sought to identify folk literature in the province of Capiz according to genres, craft a literary analysis based on folk literature and determine literary criticism approaches which are applicable for literary analysis. The study utilized descriptive-qualitative research employing literary critical approaches. The multi-stage purposive sampling procedure was used. The most common folk literature in the province were the following: ambahanon, binalaybay, composo, harana, hurobaton, lowa, paktakon and pamulong-pulong used the spoken introduction for the ulitawo and lin-ay in the public dance (bayle). The selected folk literature identified represent the historical, cultural, social, anthropological or even religious aspects of the Capizenos' way of life.

Kalyāṇa is Wrecked: The Remaking of a Medieval Capital in Popular Imagination

Perhaps no other pre-modern city has captured the Kannada cultural imagination more than Kalyāṇa. This medieval capital of the Cāḷukyas and the Kālacūris has been re-imagined and re-presented repeatedly by thousands of Kannada authors for the past 800 years. This paper suggests that rather than the heights reached by the city, its decline, captured in the phrase Keṭṭittu Kalyāṇa (Kalyāṇa was wrecked), has been the source of fascination. Kalyāṇa’s decline seems to have been caused by the Śaraṇas (those who seek refuge in Śiva), who seem to have assembled in Kalyāṇa by the middle of the twelfth century and who fought with the Kālacūri kings and the orthodox social groups. This led to the abandoning of the city in the 1160s, as the Śaraṇas themselves fled to different parts of South India. The Vīraśaiva poets use this event as the founding moment of their community. Offering a different perspective, Kannada folk epics, sung by lower caste and untouchable singers, suggest that there was a moral collapse among the Śaiva devotees; thus there is a second sense in which Kalyāṇa was wrecked, this time in the realm of narratives. Both the Vīraśaiva poets and folk singers use Kalyāṇa to produce autonomous cultural imaginations. My intention here is to recognize how Kalyāṇa becomes a radical space, a reference to which allows different social groups to overturn existing social hierarchies and offer alternative social visions.

A case study of the shaping of premodern Serbian ethnicity through saints, martyrs and heroes of the folk epics: Ethno-symbolic approach

By applying ethno-symbolist approach in studying premodern ethnic community shaping, this article analyzes the role of the most important saintly, martyr and heroic figures of the Serbian folk epics in development of the Serbian ethnicity up to the nineteenth century. This symbolic content was viewed through the prism of the theoretical concept of ethno-history, i.e. as a part of a complex ethnic narrative which contains different parts of myths and historical memories of members of an ethnie. Special attention was given to explanation of social conditions which were, in historical perspective, defining character of collective memory of premodern Serbs. Findings of the researches showed that epic characters of Prince Lazar, Milos Obilic, and Prince Marko, as well as protagonists of poems about Serbian battles against Ottoman Empire from the beginning of the nineteenth century, originated as a result of different group interests and needs initiated by political, cultural and economic features of the time when the poetry was made. By the same token, historical role of the Serbian church, as well as the influence of centuries of social subordination of the members of Serbian ethnic community during the Ottoman reign. Findings of this analysis leads to a conclusion that building of an ethnical identity, as a rule, is not a linear and spontaneous process, marked with continual accumulation of memories, and its development is defined with the moments of collective forgetting, much needed for the survival of the group.

Metahistorical Contexts of Demetillo’s Barter in Panay: An Epic

The Philippines, a treasury of oral folk epics, gives us opportunities to research epics in transition, which implies documenting epics and introducing them to a wider audience. The losing of living epic tradition attracts national and international attention, and becomes a concern of the state and the educational system. This study is focused on the metahistorical contexts of the epic Barter in Panay authored by Ricaredo Demetillo (1961) who gathered his materials from the Maragtas, a semi-historical, semi- legendary record of the Bornean settlement in Panay. The study is anchored to E.A. Manuel’s theory of Philippine ethnoepics. It aimed to prove the value of the text as an ethnoepic. Specifically, the study aims to answer: What is the narrative structure of the epic Barter in Panay? How the characterization and narration revealed the metahistorical contexts of the epic? How Barter in Panay is defined through its literary devices? Barter in Panay as an ethnoepic reflects the “sweetness and light” of the Filipino identity that lays me to embrace my unique genetic origin and rich traditions. The voice in the epic sketches the community beyond the spatial and projects itself into the future that will continue his legacy to the young who will listen to the tales. The epic contains historically self-aware characters providing an integral engine to the Filipino identity.

Understanding the Filipino Worldviews in Demetillo’s Barter in Panay: An Epic

The Philippines, a treasury of oral folk epics, gives us opportunities to research epics in transition, which implies documenting and introducing them to wider audiences. The losing of living epic tradition attracts national and international attention and becomes a concern of the state and the educational system. This study is focused on the literary characteristics Ricaredo Demetillo’s (1961) Barter in Panay: An Epic in which his materials were gathered from Maragtas, a semi-legendary recordof the Bornean settlement in Panay. The study is anchored to Hornedo’s theory of reality frames in teaching literature. It unfolds the literary characteristics of the text through descriptive-qualitative method employing formalistic-contextualist approach. The study reveals (1) the theme/s through the narration of the persona, (2) the Filipino worldviews in contemporary times though the language of the characters. Barter in Panay: An Epic reflects the “sweetness and light” of the Filipino lifeways and traditional values. Demetillo’s literary epic is vehicle of preserving our folkloric tradition depicting our Filipino identity and worldview, making the text significant in the canon of Philippine and World literatures. The author emphasizes the urgency to know our past and to revise our understanding of the world within the progress of time. Keywords - Folk literature, barter in Panay, formalistic-contextualist approach, reality frames in teaching literature, literary epic, Central Panay, Philippines

The Socio-cultural and Political Undertones in Demetillo's Barter in Panay: An Epic

The Philippines, a treasury of oral folk epics, calls us for opportunities to research epics in transition, documenting and introducing them to wider audiences. Losing of the epic tradition attracts national and international attention and becomes a concern of the state and the educational system. This study is focused on the metahistorical contexts of the epic Barter in Panay by Ricaredo Demetillo (1961) who gathered his materials from Maragtas. The study is anchored to Hornedo’s (2004) theory of reality frames in teaching literature. Employing descriptive-qualitative method of research through textual analysis unfolds the value of the text as literary and fictive-historical records. The study aims to answer: How the narrative structure of the epic unveils the political and social practices of the Visayan people? How the characterization reveals the themes of the literary epic? Barter in Panay reflects the “sweetness and light” of the Filipino lifeways-its unique genetic origin and rich traditions. The voice in the epic sketches the community beyond the spatial and projects itself into the future who continues his legacy to the young listening to the tales. The epic contains historically self-aware characters providing integral engines to the Filipino identity. The study benchmarks for literary-anthropological research.

Editor’s Column

Editor’s Column John Zemke May 3, 2013 marked the first anniversary of the loss of John Miles Foley and a period of mourning at the Center for Studies in Oral Tradition. This issue proffers to you, the readers, additional evidence of one dimension of John’s extraordinary legacy, the establishment and nurturing for more than a quarter of a century of Oral Tradition. We open with Nina Livesey’s study of Romans 4:9–12, a dialogue between the apostle Paul and a fictitious Jewish teacher whose interpretation vexed scholarly analysis concerned with the ethnic identity of the people mentioned in Rom 4:12. At issue is the presence of a purportedly “anomalous” dative article that New Testament scholars have resolved on grammatical, ideological, or theological grounds by simple deletion. Drawing on Hellenistic authors’ attentiveness to euphony and sound mapping techniques systematized by Margaret Lee and Bernard Scott, Livesey identifies six structural periods coinciding with the passage’s dialogical form and elaborates compelling analyses of them. The map of acoustic patterns identifies recurring sound groups that provide an overarching structure within which certain recurrent metonyms, particularly terms for “circumcised” and “foreskinned,” are located. The placement and prominence of the sound patterns authenticate the legitimacy of the dative article and direct attention toward the sense of the passage, rhetorically framing the apostle Paul’s assurance to the Gentiles that the uncircumcised may by faith be legitimate heirs to Abrahamic rectitude since God declared Abraham righteous before his circumcision. Next, four successive articles cluster around the theme Archiving Orality and Connecting with Communities of the 2010 World Oral Literature Project workshop. Under the aegis of Cambridge University’s Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, the workshop explored professional and ethical issues entailed by the dissemination of oral arts through traditional and digital media. First in this group, Carole Pegg and Erkinova Elizaveta Yamaeva report and interpret fieldwork with Altaian speakers in their practice of Ak Jang (“White Way”) rituals. Biannual spring and fall rituals at the küree (“place of gatherings”) temple complex in a recondite locale above the village are conducted for the purpose of maintaining universal order and tranquility, clan and family harmony, and personal happiness. Led by ritual specialists who are expert in ancient Altaian epic and unfolding in pre-liminal, liminal, and post-liminal phases, the ceremonies connect participants with historico-mythical space and time while also anchoring them in the present, creating a phenomenological, topographic space; a numinous performance space, and a sense of “being-in-place.” This sense of being-in-place emanates from the worshippers’ awareness that earth, mountains, sky, ancestors, epic heroes, temple complex, gods, planets, kin, and community are all living entities that ground Altaian personhood. Participants report experiencing “the arrival of energy and good fortune encircling them with a constantly rotating belt.” An eCompanion presents photos of ritual sites and worshippers. Next, John Meza Cuero tells Margaret Field a trickster tale in the Tipaay dialect of the Kumeyaay language (and in Spanish) in Baja California, Mexico, prompting a joint reflection on ethical questions regarding a cultural group’s preferences for usage of audio or video recordings of the community’s heritage. For instance, in Mexico a prevailing “variationist” attitude that accords all dialects of Kumeyaay equal status appears to warrant the sharing of traditional verbal arts with outsiders while in the United States a “localist” language ideology keeps intangible heritage exclusively within the Kumeyaay community. Tale-telling doubly indexes group identity—the larger community by the tale and the local community by its idiom—and the authors urge researchers to maintain balance in intra-communal interests by judiciously publishing recordings from various dialect groups. Without such precautions unintended language standardization may undermine language revitalization schemes, and specific groups may perceive diminished local prestige with corrosive effects on collaboration. A video-taped performance of the Rabbit and Frog tale told by John Meza Cuero is available in an eCompanion for the viewer’s delectation. A Rajasthani folk epic, Pabuji ki par/phad (“Pabuji with the scroll”), is the focus for Elizabeth Wickett’s study of some of the consequences visited on oral tradition by the explosion in modern...

Between orality and literacy: parallelism and repetition in Russian folk epics and their challenge to translation

Between orality and literacy: parallelism and repetition in Russian folk epics and their challenge to translation

Calling Cards

Calling Cards Thomas F. Dillingham (bio) A Brahms Card Ballad: Poems Selected for Hungarians. John Ridland. Dowitcher Press. http://dowitcherdesigns.com/dowitcherpress. 64 pages; paper, $13.95. The best ballads give us stories of quests. The adventurous youth sets out to find or win a treasure, whether a person (the ideal loved one) or a valued object, sacred or profane. The quest requires journeys through time and space, overcoming obstacles and, most important, providing proof of the hero's worthiness. The title poem of John Ridland's new volume provides a curious modern instance; subtitled "From, for, and to Tibor Frank," the poem retells the quest of the dedicatee to add to his collection of calling cards of famous people, a card from the composer, Johannes Brahms. As a boy, the seeker finds a Brahms calling card in a bookstore, But its price—400 Schillings— Would barely buy enoughFor his mother to sew a dress from Of ruffley Austrian stuff And so, he refrains from satisfying his quest. With a graceful leap, the ballad takes us forty years later to a repeat performance—the same or a similar card would cost as much as his "monthly stipend," and so he looks again and again, choosing self-denial, fails to realize his quest, but plans to continue, at appropriate intervals, visiting "secondhand bookshops / To check the Brahms card prices." As does this pleasing example of a literary ballad, many of John Ridland's poems show the rich interaction of traditional forms with characteristic modern themes and situations. The splendid and wrenching psalmody of "Elegy for My Aunt," the Herrick-like lilt of the ten-line stanzas in "Life With Unkie," the deft control of "My First Villanelle," the clever sestina of "Explosion in the Slat Factory" (about Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 [1912]) all testify to Ridland's commitment to the discipline of the poetic art. They also show the added intensity of emotion or thought subjected to the discipline of strict form. In 1999, John Ridland published his English translation of a greatly revered Hungarian poem, John the Valiant (revised, Hesperus Press, 2004); Sándor Petőfi's nineteenth-century "folk epic," a poem alternating between fanciful adventure and buffoonish comedy, is described as the best-known of all Hungarian poems. Ridland's translation was a result of several visits to Hungary and a testament to his fondness for the nation and its culture. In appreciative, even grateful response, his "selected poems" translated into Hungarian was published in Budapest in 2004. This volume included works selected from nearly fifty years of Ridland's career; the opening poem, "New Zealander," is dated 1956, and the rest of the poems, chosen by Gyula Kodolányi, translated by Kodolányi and five other Hungarian poets, extend into the twenty-first century. The volume contains a variety of poems, but leans heavily toward the elegiac and the literary or artistic. In addition to Ridland's elegy for his aunt and reminiscences of life with Unkie, we find "Last Poem for My Father," the brilliant "The Poet Who Didn't Smoke" (in memory of Hungarian poets Ernő Szép and Miklós Radnóti), and the deeply affecting sequence, "The Little John Poems," in memory of "John Forbes Ridland, 1963-1969"; its conclusion, "Anniversary Elegy," will stand with the very finest short poems about loss of a loved one. (I think of Ben Jonson, of Thomas Hardy, of James Wright.) Along with the elegies are the low-keyed and witty poems of commentary—the tight couplets of "Letter to Huck Finn" (telling him that contrary to rumor and hope, Pap is not dead, and never will be), the self-effacing "On Translating Janos Vitez," a fine example of the authorial trope of modesty, or the clever "Dear Absolute," a missive with dismissive reply. There are also several ekphrastic poems, including the fine evocation of Johannes Vermeer's "The Little Street": Where all is labor, labor may turn art,And through an art like his draw up to love,Straighten bent spines and the bruised knees that jutAgainst the beauty they are remnants of,Before the creaking winter slams them...

Herder, Heyne, and F.A. Wolf: An Homeric Controversy and its Relevance Today

Herder, Heyne, and F.A. Wolf: an Homeric Controversy and Its Relevance Today Statement of Purpose: The goal is to reconstruct and evaluate a contentious moment in the history of late 18th century Homeric scholarship in which F.A. Wolf, C.G. Heyne, and J.G. Herder made and responded to accusations of plagiarism regarding the originality of Wolf’s Prolegomena ad Homerum. First I recapitulate the chronology and terms of the vitriolic controversy, an affair that seems nearly forgotten today – Grafton’s comprehensive article (1981) on Wolf does not mention it, Wilamovitz (1959) barely alludes to it, and Sandys (1908) gives a mere sketch – though it gripped Homeric philology and German literary figures alike in its time. Next, I provide a re-analysis of the claims and outcomes of the controversy, taking Wagner’s unpublished German dissertation (1960), Volkmann’s discussion (1874), and the letters of Herder, Heyne, Schiller, and Wolf as starting points. Finally, I demonstrate that the debate turns on issues still relevant to contemporary Homeric scholarship: contested interpretations of (1) origin and originality (2) aesthetic quality (3) Homeric unity, and (4) the performance of folk epic. Abstract: By the end of the 18th century, perhaps no conjunction would have been more suggestive for the study of Homer than that of F.A. Wolf, whose Prolegomena ad Homerum (with its argument based on oral rhapsodic transmission and the absence of Homeric literacy) altered Homeric research for a century, and Johann Gottfried Herder, champion of oral folk poetry since the 1770s (viz., the Auszug aus einem Briefwechsel uber Ossian und die Lieder alter Volker of 1773 and the Volkslieder collection of 1778/79). But it was not to be. In the same year that Wolf’s Prolegomena appeared (1795), Herder published an article, “Homer, ein Gunstling der Zeit” (in Schiller’s journal Die Horen), in which Herder discussed the rhapsodic transmission of Homer, the unity of the poems, and even mentioned having seen Villoison’s scholia during a visit to Italy (Herder/Suphan 1967). The article received a bitter response from Wolf, who claimed among other things a sort of plagiarism by Herder, in the Intelligenzblatt der Allgemeinen Literatur-Zeitung on October 24, 1795 (Wagner). Heyne, after a failed appeal from Wolf, in turn accused Wolf of plagiarizing his own ideas concerning Homeric transmission. The controversy took place in journals, newspapers, pamphlets, and letters, and so must be reconstructed, which I do in this talk. My presentation lays out the terms and chronology of the debate, and shows how the controversy turned on mistaken chronology, ambiguous philological disputes, and subjective claims to the paternity of ideas. I conclude that no plagiarism occurred and argue for the relevance of the controversy for Homeric research in the 21st century, and in conclusion offer a piece of evidence hitherto unknown to Homeric scholarship: on March 26, 1819, the Austrian Empire’s renowned Slavic scholar, Jernej Kopitar, argued in a letter to Wolf that “today there is no better match for your Homeric ‘Homerids’ than in Serbia and Bosnia” (my trans.; Vasmer 1938), and directed Wolf to read recently published (in 1818) German translations, made by Kopitar, of Vuk Karadžic’s Serbo-Croatian oral epics – a suggestion met by silence from Wolf, a scholar no longer interested in comparisons inspired by Herder’s legacy of Homeric and folk poetry. Bibliographical Matter for APA Abstract 2010 Grafton, Anthony. 1981. “Prolegomena to Friedrich August Wolf,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, vol. 44 (1981):101-129. Herder, J.G. Aus Herders Nachlas. 1856/1857. Hrsg. von H. Duntzer und F. G. von Herder., 3 Bde., Frankfurt a. M. Herder, Johann Gottfried. 1861-2. Von und an Herder. Ungedruckte Briefe aus Herders Nachlass, ed. H. Duntzer and F. G. von Herder, II, Leipzig: Dyk. Herder, J.G. “Homer, ein Gunstling der Zeit.” 1932. In: Gegenwart und Altertum, 160-182=Dt. Lit. Reihe Klassik, Bd. II, bearb., von W. Muschg, Leipzig. Herder, J.G. Ed. Bernhard Suphan. 1967. Samtliche Werke, vol. XVIII. Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung Hildesheim. Heyne, Christian Gottlieb. 1802. Homeri Carmina, Leipzig. Pattison, M. Essays, vol. I. 1889. Oxford, Clarendon Press. [Wolf essay = pp. 337-414]. Sandys, John Edwin. 1908. A History of Classical Scholarship, vol. III. Cambridge UP. Schiller, Fr. Schillers Briefe. 1892. Stuttgart, Leipzig, Berlin, Wien. Vasmer, M. 1938. Bausteine zur Geschicte der deutsch-slavischen geistigen Beziehungen I. Abhandlungen der Preusischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Jahrgang 1938, Philosophisch- Historische Klasse (esp. pp.112-113). Volkmann, R. 1874. Geschichte und Kritik der Wolfschen Prolegomena zu Homer, Leipzig. Wagner, Fritz. 1960. Herders Homerbild, seine Wurzeln und Wirkungen. Inaugural-Dissertation zur Erlangung des Doktorgrades der Philosophischen Fakultat der Universitat Koln. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich von. 1998 (orig.1959). Geschichte der Philologie, mit einem Nachwort und Register von Albert Henrichs. Stuttgart:Teubner. Wolf, Fr. A. Prolegomena ad Homerum. 1795. Halle. Wolf, Fr. A. Ein Leben in Briefen. 1935. Hrsg. von S. Reiter, Stuttgart.

Book Reviews

MankindVolume 14, Issue 3 p. 225-247 Book Reviews First published: April 1984 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1835-9310.1984.tb01404.xAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Abstract Book reviewed in this article: Cooking, Cuisine and Class: A Study in Comparative Sociology. By Jack Goody Nutritional Anthropology: Contemporary Approaches to Diet and Culture. Edited by Norge W. Jerome. Randy F. Kandal and Gretel H. Pelto An Anthropological Perspective. Edited by Jack O. Waddell and Michael W. Everett Through a Glass Darkly: Beer and Modernization in Papua New Guinea. Edited by Mac Marshall Colonialism and Foreign Ownership of Capital. A Trade Theorists View. By Bharat R. Hazari, Croom Helm Human Resource Development An Annotated Bibliography on Social & Cultural Influences. Compiled by Nat J. Colleta and Trudy A. Todd Traditional Housing in African Cities. A Comparative Study of Housing in Zaria, Ibadan, and Marrakech. By Friedrich Schwerdtfeger The Yoruba Today. By I. S. Eades. Changing Cultures Defiant Maids and Stubborn Farmers: Traditions and Invention in Mende Story Performance. By Donald Cosentino Reflections of a Woman Anthropologist. No Hilling Place. By Manda Cesara Woman's Worth. Sexual Economics and the World of Women. By Lisa Leghorn and Katherme Parker Women and Dualism. A Sociology of Knowledge Analysis. By Lynda M. Glennon Trucanini. Queen or Traitor? By Vivienne Rae Ellis Aborigines and Uranium and Other Essays. By Colin Tatz Aboriginal Futures. A Review of Research and Developments and Related Policies in the Education of Aborigines. A Summary. By B. H. Watts Australian Aborigines in the News. Traditional Music of Torres Strait. Recorded by Jeremy Beckett Aboriginal Sound Instruments. Recorded, edited and annotated by Alice M. Moyle Songs from North Queensland. Recorded, edited and annotated by Alice M. Moyle Songs of the Kimberleys. Recorded, annotated and compiled by Alice M. Moyle Djambidj. An Aboriginal Song Series from Northern Australia. Performed by Frank Gurr-manarnana and Frank Malkorde (singers) and Sam Gumugun (didjeridu), Goethe Institute, Canberra Studies in Pacific Languages and Cultures in Honour of Bruce Biggs. Edited by J. Hollyman and A. Pawley The Three Twins. The Telling of a South Indian Folk Epic. By Brenda E. F. Beck The Masked Media. Aymara Fiestas and Social Interaction in the Bolivian Highlands. By Hans C. Buechler The Play of the Gods, Locality, Ideology, Structure and Time in the Festivals of a Bengali Town. By Äkos Östör Principles and Practice of Human Physiology. Edited by O. G. Edholm and J. S. Weiner Monumenta Brittannica or A Miscellany of British Antiquities (Parts One and Two). By John Aubrey. Edited by John Fowles Environmental Archaeology. By Myra Shackley Volume14, Issue3April 1984Pages 225-247 RelatedInformation

Revitalisation of the folk epics of the Lower Yangzi Delta: an example of China's intangible cultural Heritage

Revitalisation of the folk epics of the Lower Yangzi Delta: an example of China's intangible cultural Heritage

Als der Herrgott, der Satan und Sankt Petrus mit der Schöpfung beschäftigt waren

In this paper I focus on dualistic creation stories, but without an attempt at an all-European overview. The analysis is confined to Swedish, Hungarian and Russian cultures, and references are made to various genres of literary fiction, folk legends, religious folk epic songs and annals. In the background of these examples the religious ideology of medieval bogomilism can be traced. “The Legend of Småland”, a chapter in Selma Lagerlöf’s children’s novel “The Wonderful Adventures of Nils”, draws on a dualistic cosmogonic myth of apocryphal traditions. This myth represents a modified variant of an etiological, dualistic belief. Satan is replaced by Saint Peter, who is believed to have created the mountains, which are symbolic of chaos, in the plain called Småland. In contrast, the plain was created by God. In the mythological view of the world, the plain is symbolic of the world of order, i.e. cosmos. The motif of soil or sand brought up from the bottom of the sea as well as the cooperation of the Creator and his Demiurge in the creation myth may be part of the ancient heritage in Hungarian mythology, or the motifs of the dualistic creation myth may have been borrowed later in the new homeland from nearby or distant neighbours whose tradition had been deeply affected by bogomilism. In the Russian Primary Chronicle, at the year 1071, an apocryphal story can be read in which magicians (‘volchvy’) present their ideas concerning the creation of man in accordance with the dualistic concept of Bogomils. The human body was created by Satan, from a bunch of straw hurled down from Heaven by God, and it was God who placed the soul in the body. Certain textual variants of “The Book of the Depths” (‘Golubinaja kniga’), a Russian religious folk epic, describe the single combat between Truth (‘Pravda’) and Falsehood (‘Krivda’). This combat can be interpreted, although indirectly, as the Bogomil tenet of the fight between Logos (Jesus) and Satan.

De-composition in Popular Elizabethan Playtexts: A Revalidation of the Multiple Versions of Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet

De-composition in Popular Elizabethan Playtexts:A Revalidation of the Multiple Versions of Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet Lene Petersen (bio) Recomposition and De-composition in Playtexts and Folk Texts When Grimm's folktales returned to the folk, they tended to become purified and in many ways have again approached the abstract style that was weakened by Wilhelm Grimm. According to the Swiss folklorist Max Lüthi (1986:110-11), a rendition of the Cinderella tale narrated by a North German farm worker "restores the sort of progression of clearly defined elements (Steigerung) that strives for clear and simple visibility and that had become effaced in Grimm's mistier, more poetical phrasing . . . in oral tradition it corrects itself." The aim of this article is to establish some premises for comparing the transmission of playtexts of the early modern stage with the transmission of folk material. My central question is whether playtexts and ballad and tale texts "de-compose" in similar ways, and, if they do, whether we may then predict a similar "goal product" that can only be achieved through transmission. The detailed comparison of traditionalized ballads and Elizabethan playtexts is still a relatively uncharted field of inquiry, and this article thus simultaneously revisits and supplements the few observations published in this field so far. In the quotation above, referring to the traditional folktale Cinderella, Lüthi stresses the power of oral tradition to correct, simplify, and make visible the narrative aspects that aesthetic/authorial composition complicates or obscures in a recorded text. The final product of transmission Lüthi called the Zielform,1 meaning "goal form." He saw the notion of the Zielform as relating both to the transmission and form of folk tales and folk epic, and his research, most of which was carried out in the 1960s and 1970s, assumes that under the right auspices a given story will transform according to certain expected (and hence predictable) corrective "laws" as it evolves and multiplies into different versions. During this process the tale may be zurechterzählt, "told into shape," or possibly zerzählt, meaning "dis-told," or "told out of shape." Either way, the mutation process that a given story undergoes in tradition is seen to be positive and necessary to the formal survival of that story. Cecil Sharp's view of the evolutionary adaptability of the traditional folk ballad was similar (1923:38): In the evolution of species of the animal and vegetable worlds, those variations will be preserved which are of advantage to their possessors in the competition for existence. In the evolution of folk [songs] . . . the corresponding principle of selection is the taste of the community. Those . . . variations, which appeal to the community, will be perpetuated, as against those which attract the individual only. By using examples of variant versions of traditionalized English broadside ballads alongside the multiple-text Shakespearean plays Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, I hope to illustrate how a similar selective mechanism can be detected in the transmission of early modern playtexts. I also want to illustrate how the formative importance of transmission is made apparent in such texts through the generation of certain identifiable stylo-structural features. Given that I shall be referring recurrently to the terms "transmission" and "tradition" in this article I should like clarify from the start what I mean by those terms in relation to popular stage plays. By the transmission of playtexts, I mean the long-term interaction between stage-performance and print distribution over time, in the sense described by Adam Fox (2000:5). Tradition, then, is defined as the equally time-dependent accumulation of identifiable textual witnesses (extant and lost) produced by transmission. Thus recordings of the Hamlet story in various playtexts formats (octavo, quarto, folio), along with related forms such as plots, parts, and play summaries in table books and diaries, all belong to the tradition of Hamlet, as do ballads of the kind referred to as "residuals" by Bruce R. Smith. In "Shakespeare's Residuals," published recently in a collection of essays on Shakespeare and Elizabethan Popular Culture, Smith argues that there is a sustained relationship of cultural residuality between Elizabethan stage plays and ballads, suggesting that plays and ballads enter...

In the Wake of the Balkan Myth: Questions of Identity and Modernity by David A. Norris (review)

574 SEER, 85, 3, JULY 2OO7 theApollonian (i.e., rationality being the only road to happiness). Involved in founding a new culture, he is, like Peter theGreat inPeterburg, willing to sacrifice himself and others for the future good. In Zamiatin's dystopian novel My, legality functions in a similar way, but here it is satirically exaggerated and fundamentally negative. The under ground is both political and psychological because the revolutionaries want to restore emotion and the imagination (the Dionysian) which have been abolished by a state founded entirely on rationality (theApollonian). Gerigk concludes that Sologub and Zamiatin represent a pessimistic model inwhich negatively perceived legality oppresses the individual and cannot be overthrown, whereas Gor'kii and Gladkov represent an optimistic view, in which present or future legality is identifiedwith 'just cause'. Gerigk sees Belyi as a tragic model, because the balance between underground and legality can be maintained only for a short time before a cultural cycle comes to an inevitable end. Gerigk's study is compiled from lectures to students of Russian and comparative literature.This results in an eloquent stylewhich makes reading a true pleasure, but the volume's sparse bibliography and lack of consider ation of critical literature is surprising in a publication of this significance. Still, thebook will be of great interestnot only to students but to the academic community at large. Department ofSlavonic Studies U. Lange Universityof Mainz Norris, David A. In the Wake ofthe BalkanMyth: QuestionsofIdentity and Modernity. Palgrave, Basingstoke and New York, 1999. xiv + 192 pp. Notes. Maps. Plates. Bibliography. Index. ?58.00. The late nineteenth-century Serbian writer Laza Kostic once tried to explain the relationship between the culture of Serbia and those ofmajor Western European cultures using the scenario of a phone conversation, in which the speaker in Belgrade keeps repeating: 'Can you hear us? We do hear you, can you hear us?', with the other end of the line remaining silent. If you were to substitute 'Serbian' with 'Bulgarian' or 'Slovak', or any other Central or South East European culture, the image would still retain its value and accu rately express the frustrations of smaller European cultures at not being heard, or not being understood. David Norris begins In the Wake of the BalkanMyth: Questions ofIdentityandModernity by reminding his reader of Bakhtin's idea, expressed in hisNovy mir interview, of a dialogue between cultures, inwhich they open up to each other. By contrast, those small nations that emerged in nineteenth-century Europe had to struggle from their early days with an imbalance in the dialogue through which cultures come into being. The Balkan's entry into this symbolic dialogue has been hindered by what Norris calls the 'Balkan myth': the cluster of representations of the Balkans as a seat of primitivism,which isalternately looked upon positively ('noble savage') and negatively ('threatening barbarian'). Norris maintains that the source of the REVIEWS 575 Balkan myth lies in theWest, and its fears of a cultural Other. It reduces a culturally varied territory into a threatening unity which both justifies the colonialist ventures of theGreat Powers, and relieves them of responsibility for the origins of the FirstWorld War. Western images were established on an identity of the Balkan as Other and alien to themodern world. The West offered cultural recognition to that exotic world on the borders of theOrient, within the European family of cultures, but kept itas a separate space which was not and would never be fully integrated. The production of Balkan semantics isbased on a narrow range of persis tent images, reinvented as appropriate in each historical moment, and derived fromRomanticist aesthetics which privileged the national authenticity disco vered in folk epics. Norris shows how the Balkan myth resurfaces in critical periods in its Janus-like form ? either noble savage or primitive barbarian ? from thewritings of journalists such as Harry De Windt orJohn Reed at the beginning of the twentieth century, to those of Ian Traynor, the current Balkan correspondent of The Guardian. However, while other small and more colonized societies in a classical sense established a culture of resistance to the foreign voice, in Serbian culture the dominant motifs of the noble savage and primitive barbarian eventually came to dominate...

Kalevala through Translation: Continuity, Rewriting and Appropriation of an Epic

The Kalevala, the national epic of the Finnish people, published in the 19th century and created by E. Lönnrot from songs collected in the Karelian countryside (Northwestern Russia), is the result of a long process of rewriting. This process has manifested itself through successive retranslations in various languages and through certain strategies favored by the epic’s translators. Recent translations reflect a tendency to appropriate the epic through the use of a vocabulary and poetic style that are specific to the culture of the translator. For example, verse translations in Tamil are structured in the manner of folk epics of Southern India; while in the French verse translation the translator has made abundant use of archaisms and neologisms.

The Writer and the Native Tradition: A Conversation

The Writer and the Native Tradition:A Conversation Muhammad Haji Salleh (bio) and F. Sionil José Born in 1942, Muhammad Haji Salleh is one of Malaysia's best-known authors. He entered the Malay College, Kuala Kangsar, in 1958, where he excelled in the study of English and Malay. In 1970 he became a lecturer at the National University of Malaysia, and for many years he was the director and head of several university departments. In 1977, he was a visiting professor at North Carolina State University, and from 1992 to 1993 was a Fulbright visiting researcher at the University of California at Berkeley. From 1993 to 1994 he was the chair of Malay Studies, Leiden University, the Netherlands. He has also been a fellow at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University, and since 2000 has been a professor of the School of Humanities at Science University of Malaysia, Penang. In 1977, his collection of poems Perjalanan Si Tenggang II, which he later translated into English as The Travel Journals of Si Tenggang II, won the asean Literary Award. His only collection of poems written originally in English is Time and Its People, published in 1978. Among his other works, including collections of Malay-language poems translated into English, are Tradition and Change in Contemporary Malay-Indonesian Poetry, Pengalaman Puisi, Cermin Diri Yang Empunya Ceritera: The Mind of the Malay Author, Beyond the Archipelago, Rowing Down Two Rivers, Laughter and Romance in the Archipelago, and Aksara Usia. Recognition for Salleh's work includes Malaysia's highest honor for an author, the Anugerah Sasterawan Negara, for his contribution to Malay Literature. In addition, he has received the Australian Cultural Award to Asian Artists, the sea Write Award, and the Southeast Asian Literary Award. FSJ As a poet, how do you use your tradition? MHS I can answer in fairly concrete terms. I experiment with forms. After being introduced to other literatures of the world, I feel that we in Southeast Asia have our unique forms and aesthetics which can't be found [End Page 44] in the West. These are our own, from which we grow. And we don't have to be like an airport—all poems, all poets—we should be different. Especially now that local traditions are being replaced by global ones. They can be retrieved through new experiments. But more than that, of course, tradition is not only a poetic form or a poetic line. It is a whole way of thinking, of writing, and even a concept of literature. FSJ That's very important. Let's discuss this concept because it is something that many writers don't understand. For most of us, the novel, the short story—these are Western borrowings. So what is the concept? MHS For one, I don't think it's possible to develop a genre out of nothing. In Malaysia, we started with the novel in the 1930s, but before that, there were so many versions of it—novels, hikayats,and kisahsand ceritas. FSJ What is hikayat? MHS It is a form of narrative prose that we borrowed from the Persians. Although we adopted their term and, at times, the story line, everything else became bound in Malay literary styles. In the end it was really ours. But the terms for it stayed. So the works that began to be produced in the 1920s can be called novels, but all the components—style, movement, the cyclic way of arranging time—were Malay, not Persian. There was, as in other countries, a gradation of change. FSJ Well, it's the same thing with us, though there are literary forms in the Philippines that predate the Spaniards. I'm speaking of the folk epics, especially the Mindanao epics. The Spaniards brought in the verse form, and many of our earliest poets recited poetry in our own languages. The most famous Tagalog long poem, "Florante at Laura," is not an epic, but it follows the metric romances of Europe. The Mangyans of Mindoro still recite their old poetry. Some of them may make new ones, but the difference is that there is no particular author to...

Jack V. Haney. An Introduction to the Russian Folktale. Armonk, NY and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1999. viii, 135 pp. $40.00 (cloth); $18.95 (paper). An Anthology of Russian Folk Epics. Edited by James Bailey and Tatiana Ivanova. Armonk, NY and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1998. 464 pp. $69.95 (cloth); $29.95 (paper).

Jack V. Haney. An Introduction to the Russian Folktale. Armonk, NY and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1999. viii, 135 pp. $40.00 (cloth); $18.95 (paper). An Anthology of Russian Folk Epics. Edited by James Bailey and Tatiana Ivanova. Armonk, NY and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1998. 464 pp. $69.95 (cloth); $29.95 (paper).

The arts and literature of India

This special issue of the International journal of Hindu studies on India's arts and literature has been a delight to assemble. The authors of the essays collected here have produced exemplary studies of India's artistic and literary heritage. Their work deserves wide circulation. In the interest of brevity and to allow their essays as much space as possible, this Introduction will only hint at the content of the essays that follow. One theme that links all these essays is that artistic works are performances. David Gitomer's study of the raudra rasa, or furious emotional state, in poetics and drama highlights the gendered way in which this state is depicted in gastra literature. Laurie Patton's essay on the uses of poetry in Vedic ritual emphasizes the artistic and interpretive skill employed by the ritual performer. Michael Meister's review article on the National Museum of Art's exhibition of ancient Cambodian sculpture shows how Hindu cosmology was instantiated on the ground at Angkor Vat, its builders articulating in stone a vision of cosmic order. Alf Hiltebeitel's application of 'primary process' to the Mahabharata and Ramaya.na links those Sanskrit narratives with vernacular-language folk epics recited and performed throughout India. Mandakranta Bose's study of the hybrid performance genre called uparapaka shows it to be a mixture of drama and dance and clarifies the relationships among various subgenres. These articles, written by some of the finest scholars of India's literature, drama, and art, constitute this special issue of the journal. We hope that their work will provide for the reader new perspectives on India's civilization.

English Trader, Indian Maid: Representing Gender, Race, and Slavery in the New World. An Inkle and Yarico Reader

On March 13, 1711, an article appeared in The Spectator about Thomas Inkle, a young and aspiring English trader cast ashore in the Americas, who is saved from violent death by Yarico, a beautiful Indian maiden. When he and Yarico become lovers, Inkle promises to clothe her in silks and transport her in carriages when he returns with her to England. Some months later, they are picked up after Yarico succeeds in signaling a passing English ship. But upon reaching Barbados, Inkle immediately sells Yarico into slavery-raising the price he demands when he learns that Yarico is pregnant with his child. Based on a real life account in Richard Ligon's History of Barbados published half a century earlier, the Spectator story caused a sensation as debate intensified over slavery in the British colonies-and it would be told and retold for decades as perhaps the most compelling folk epic of its age. English Trader, Indian Maid, Frank Felsenstein has assembled the main English versions of this once-famous story, including a newly rediscovered poetical epistle by Charles James Fox, one of the leading parliamentary promoters of the cause of abolition. As well as George Colman the Younger's still vibrant comic opera-considered by some the earliest English social problem play-the book contains tantalizing retellings from the Caribbean and from America, where the story has close affinities with the tale of Pocahontas. Also present are notable works by English women writers, such as Frances Seymour and Anna Maria Porter, and freshly attributed English renditions by Stephen Duck, the Wiltshire thresher poet, and by Peter Pindar (John Wolcot). Felsenstein also suggests an intriguing link with William Wordsworth, who may have had the story in mind while composing his Lyrical Ballads. This edition restores the story of Inkle and Yarico to its rightful place as a focal narrative in cultural and historical debate of issues of gender, race, and colonialism. In Inkle and Yarico we have that rare entity, a perfect example of an intertextual discourse that reflects so much of the diversity and contradictions of the age that fostered it ...Its diverse handling of issues of gender and race makes it a lively and highly topical discussion piece in the classroom. Equally, given the regrettable (and actually surprising) shortfall of prominent eighteenth-century literary texts that treat of the subject of slavery, Inkle and Yarico fills a highly significant gap.-from the Introduction [p.43]