American Folklore Scholarship A Dialogue of Dissent / Rosemary Levy Zumwalt.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Zumwalt, Rosemary Lévy, 1944-

Series:

Folkloristics

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Folklore.

Folklore--United States--History.

United States.

Genre:

History.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (1 online resource xiv, 186 pages.)

Place of Publication:

Indiana University Press 1988

Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1988.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Rosemary Zumwalt examines the split between the literary folklorists and the anthropological folklorists during the period from 1888, when the American Folklore Society was founded, to the early 1940s, when control of the Journal of American Folklore by the anthropologists was ended. At the center of the conflict were concerns of professionalism, science, and academic discipline. For the literary folklorists, the orientation was toward literary works and the unwritten tradition from which they derived. Folklorists a·lso focused on the study of literary types or genres. Child and Kittredge studied the ballad; Thompson, the folktale; Taylor, the riddle and the proverb. In anthropology, study was directed toward cultures without writing, and the emphasis was on fieldwork. Boas in his own writings, and in training his students, stressed collection of every aspect of the life of a people. And part of that material collected was folklore. The literary folklorists looked at literary forms for folklore while the anthropological folklorists looked at the life of the people and saw folklore only as part of it. Although this discipline-bound focus of the two factions created friction and led the two groups in different directions, it helped shape the development of the discipline in the United States.

Contents:

one: Discipline and Identity

two: American Folklore Studies: Field and Scope

three: The Schism in Folklore

four: The Literary Folklorists

five: The Anthropological Folklorists

six: Approaches to Folklore: The Literary and the Anthropological

seven: Remnants of the Past in the Present: Conflict in Contemporary Folklore Theory.

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

0-253-05554-7

OCLC:

953237374

Access Restriction:

Open access Unrestricted online access