Dirty jokes and bawdy songs : the uncensored life of Gershon Legman / Susan G. Davis.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Davis, Susan G., 1953- author.

Series:

Folklore studies in a multicultural world.

Illinois scholarship online.

Folklore studies in a multicultural world

Illinois scholarship online

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Folklorists--United States--Biography.

Folklorists.

Sex--Folklore--Research--History--20th century.

Sex.

Legman, G. (Gershon), 1917-1999.

Legman, G.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (279 pages).

Place of Publication:

Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 2020.

Summary:

Collector of sexual folklore. Cataloger of erotica. Tireless social critic. Gershon Legman's singular, disreputable resume made him a counter-cultural touchstone during his forty-year exile in France. Despite his obscurity today, Legman's prescient work and passion for the prurient laid the groundwork for our contemporary study of the forbidden. Susan G. Davis follows the life and times of the figure driven to share what he found in civilization's secret libraries. Self-taught and fiercely unaffiliated, Legman collected the risque on street corners and in theaters and dug it out of little-known archives. If the sexual humour he uncovered often used laughter to disguise hostility and fear, he still believed it indispensable to the human experience. Davis reveals Legman in all his prickly, provocative complexity as an outrageous nonconformist thundering at a wrong-headed world.

Contents:

The stranger

Sex researcher

Kinsey's bibliographer

Love & death

Neurotica

Advanced studies in folklore

"The ballad" and The horn book

The key to the fields

The hell drawer

Under Mt. Cheiron.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from home page (viewed on May 11, 2020).

Previously issued in print: 2019.

ISBN:

0-252-05145-9