Folklore Books for the New Year!

Happy 2011 - it's about that time to preview the books that are arriving in the first month of the new year. As always, there are one or two books that really excite me - for such a small discipline, at least there is always something new to keep up with.

• Folklore/Cinema: Popular Film as Vernacular Culture - Mikel J. Koven. Paperback.
• Far North Tales: Stories from the Peoples of the Arctic Circle - Bonnie Marshall & Kira Van Deusen. World Folklore Series.
• Alan Lomax, Assistant in Charge: The Library of Congress Letters, 1935-1945 - edited by Ronald Cohen. American Made Music Series.
• Jerusalem: Arab Social Life, Traditions and Everyday Pleasures - Subhi S. Gosheh. Paperback.
• Going to the Well for Water: The Seamus Innis Field Diary 1942-1946 - edited by Rionach Ui Ogain.
• Sakuntala: Texts, Readings, Histories - Romila Thapar.
• Mythology in the Middle Ages: Heroic Tales of Monsters, Magic and Might - Christopher R. Fee. Praeger Series on the Middle Ages.
• Explorations into Arab Folk Literature - Pierre Cachia.
• The Uncommon Sense of the Immotal Mullah Nasrudin: Stories, Jests, and Donkey Tales of the Beloved Persian Folk Hero - Ron J. Suresha.
• Myths of the Opossum: Pathways of Mesoamerican Mythology - Alfredo Lopex Austin.

Folklore and Google Books

Google books is a blessing to us 'independent scholars' who have trouble sneaking into the Widener library! For giggles I did a search for books with the term "folkloristics" (full view books only). Here's what came up on the top page:

• A Flowering Tree: and other oral tales from India - A. K. Ramanujan. Edited with a preface by Stuart Blackburn and Alan Dundes. University of California Press, 1997. Anthology of stories from the Kannadigas of South India which were collected from the 1950s through the 1970s. The title essay includes a list of collectors and informants. Ramanujan is a towering figure in the study of Indian folklore and a recipient of the MacArthur grant.
• "From Cairn to Oven: on the use of ethnological documents in interpreting remains of historical structures" - Kristiina Korkeakoski-Vaisanen, Journal of Estonian Archaeology 6/1, 2002.
• American Folk Medicine - ed. by Wayland D. Hand. University of California Press, 1976. Collection of essays from the 1973 UCLA conference on American Folk Medicine.
• The Hmong: 1987-1995. A Selected and Annotated Bibliography - Compiled by J. Christina Smith.
• "Interview with Prof. A. K. Ramanujan" - T. N. Shankaranarayana and S. A. Krishnaia. In Indian English Poetry: Critical Perspectives by Jaydipsinh Dodiya. Sarup & Sons, 2004 reprint. Two of the hits on the first page concern Prof. Ramanujan.
• American Folk Legend: A Symposium - ed. by Wayland D. Hand. University of California Press, 1971. Essays presented at the 1969 UCLA Conference on American Folk Legend, including essays by Dundes, Paredes, Dorson, Degh, Yoder, Brunvand, Toelken and Hand. Oh to be a fly on that wall :) Two Hands in the first page as well.
• Allegorical Speculation in an Oral Society: The Tabwa Narrative Tradition - Robert Cancel. Modern Philology No. 122, University of California Press, 1989.
• "Science in Folklore? Folklore in Science?" - Dr. Alan Dundes. The New Scientist, Dec. 22-29, 1977.
• Armenian Folklore Bibliography - Anne M. Avakian. University of California Press, 1994.
• Folkloristics: An Introduction - Robert A. Georges & Michael Owen Jones.

An interesting grab-bag of items with a few gems I fully intend on researching further. Like all things google it does take some culling. One of the best things about Google Books - no overdue fines!