South Asian Folklore

South Asian Folklore
Author: Peter Claus
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 741
Release: 2020-10-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000101223

With 600 signed, alphabetically organized articles covering the entirety of folklore in South Asia, this new resource includes countries and regions, ethnic groups, religious concepts and practices, artistic genres, holidays and traditions, and many other concepts. A preface introduces the material, while a comprehensive index, cross-references, and black and white illustrations round out the work. The focus on south Asia includes Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, with short survey articles on Tibet, Bhutan, Sikkim, and various diaspora communities. This unique reference will be invaluable for collections serving students, scholars, and the general public.

Folktales and Fairy Tales [4 volumes]

Folktales and Fairy Tales [4 volumes]
Author: Anne E. Duggan Ph.D.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 1751
Release: 2016-02-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1610692543

Encyclopedic in its coverage, this one-of-a-kind reference is ideal for students, scholars, and others who need reliable, up-to-date information on folk and fairy tales, past and present. Folktales and fairy tales have long played an important role in cultures around the world. They pass customs and lore from generation to generation, provide insights into the peoples who created them, and offer inspiration to creative artists working in media that now include television, film, manga, photography, and computer games. This second, expanded edition of an award-winning reference will help students and teachers as well as storytellers, writers, and creative artists delve into this enchanting world and keep pace with its past and its many new facets. Alphabetically organized and global in scope, the work is the only multivolume reference in English to offer encyclopedic coverage of this subject matter. The four-volume collection covers national, cultural, regional, and linguistic traditions from around the world as well as motifs, themes, characters, and tale types. Writers and illustrators are included as are filmmakers and composers—and, of course, the tales themselves. The expert entries within volumes 1 through 3 are based on the latest research and developments while the contents of volume 4 comprises tales and texts. While most books either present readers with tales from certain countries or cultures or with thematic entries, this encyclopedia stands alone in that it does both, making it a truly unique, one-stop resource.

India's Literary History

India's Literary History
Author: Stuart H. Blackburn
Publisher: Orient Blackswan
Total Pages: 540
Release: 2004
Genre: Indic literature
ISBN: 9788178240565

Spanning A Range Of Topics-Print Culture And Oral Tales, Drama And Gender, Library Use And Publishing History, Theatre And Audiences, Detective Fiction And Low-Caste Novels-This Book Will Appeal To Historians, Cultural Theorists, Sociologists And All Interested In Understanding The Multiplicity Of India`S Cultural Traditions And Literary Histories.

Folklore Studies in India: Critical Regional Responses

Folklore Studies in India: Critical Regional Responses
Author: Sahdev Luhar
Publisher: N. S. Patel (Autonomous) Arts College, Anand
Total Pages: 470
Release: 2023-02-25
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 8195500846

Folklore Studies in India: Critical Regional Responses is an interesting compilation of twenty-eight critical articles on the beginning of folklore studies in the different parts of India. In the absence of a book that could map the history of Indian folklore studies single-handedly, this book can be deemed as the first-of-its-kind to feature the historical development of folklore studies in the different states of India. This book succinctly introduces the readers to the folk culture, folk arts, and folk genres of a particular region and to the different aspects of folkloristic researches carried out in that region.

A Flowering Tree and Other Oral Tales from India

A Flowering Tree and Other Oral Tales from India
Author: A. K. Ramanujan
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2023-11-10
Genre:
ISBN: 0520311450

This book of oral tales from the south Indian region of Kannada represents the culmination of a lifetime of research by A. K. Ramanujan, one of the most revered scholars and writers of his time. The result of over three decades' labor, this long-awaited collection makes available for the first time a wealth of folktales from a region that has not yet been adequately represented in world literature. Ramanujan's skill as a translator, his graceful writing style, and his profound love and understanding of the subject enrich the tales that he collected, translated, and interpreted. With a written literature recorded from about 800 A.D., Kannada is rich in mythology, devotional and secular poetry, and more recently novels and plays. Ramanujan, born in Mysore in 1929, had an intimate knowledge of the language. In the 1950s, when working as a college lecturer, he began collecting these tales from everyone he could—servants, aunts, schoolteachers, children, carpenters, tailors. In 1970 he began translating and interpreting the tales, a project that absorbed him for the next three decades. When Ramanujan died in 1993, the translations were complete and he had written notes for about half of the tales. With its unsentimental sympathies, its laughter, and its delightfully vivid sense of detail, the collection stands as a significant and moving monument to Ramanujan's memory as a scholar and writer. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1997.

Fantasy Fictions from the Bengal Renaissance

Fantasy Fictions from the Bengal Renaissance
Author: Abanindranath Tagore
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 392
Release: 2018-06-09
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0199092176

Fantasy Fictions from the Bengal Renaissance presents two masterpieces of Bengali literature by Rabindranath Tagore’s nephews, Abanindranath Tagore and Gaganendranath Tagore. The Make-Believe Prince is the delightful story of a king, his two wives, a trickster monkey, a witch, and a helper from another world who is not a ‘fairy godmother’. Abanindranath deploys traditional children’s rhymes and paints exquisite word-pictures in his original rendering of a tale which has its roots in Bengali folktale materials in various genres. Toddy-Cat the Bold sees a group of brave comrades seek help from a young boy to rescue the son of their leader from the Two-Faced Rakshasa of the forest. Here, a more numinous supernatural helper appears. Inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, it presents a comic, exciting, and mysterious journey quite unlike Carroll’s, with many traditional local touches and an unexpected ending.

International Folkloristics

International Folkloristics
Author: Alan Dundes
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 278
Release: 1999
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780847695157

International folkloristics is a worldwide discipline in which scholars study various forms of folklore ranging from myth, folktale, and legend to custom and belief. Twenty classic essays, beginning with a piece by Jacob Grimm, reveal the evolving theoretical underpinnings of folkloristics from its nineteenth century origins to its academic coming-of-age in the twentieth century. Each piece is prefaced by extensive editorial introductions placing them in a historical and intellectual context. The twenty essays presented here, including several never published previously in English, will be required reading for any serious student of folklore.

Old Deccan Days or Hindoo Fairy Legends

Old Deccan Days or Hindoo Fairy Legends
Author: Kirin Narayan
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2002-12-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1576076814

A long-lost collection of Indian fairy tales transcribed by the daughter of the British governor of Bombay. In the cold months of 1865, young Mary Frere and her father, Bartle Frere, British governor of Bombay, set out in a caravan across the Deccan province of south central India. During their journey Mary transcribed 24 popular Hindu folktales told to her by her nursemaid. That collection of tales, which she published as Old Deccan Days, not only became the first Indian folklore collection in English, it established a new genre of writing about British India. These marvelously imaginative tales from the Indian oral tradition are peopled with beautiful, smart, outspoken women; restless, adventuresome men; gods who take on human form; and animals who know the secrets of human destinies. Evil magicians cast spells on humans, changing them to plants, and demonic, ogre-like Rakshases savor human flesh.