Epic Singers and Oral Tradition (Myth and Poetics) - Hardcover

Lord, Albert Bates

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0801424720 ISBN 13: 9780801424724

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 1991

Synopsis

Albert Bates Lord here offers an unparalleled overview of the nature of oral-traditional epic songs and the practices of the singers who composed them. Shaped by the conviction that theory should be based on what singers actually do, and have done in times past, the essays collected here span half a century of Lord's research on the oral tradition from Homer to the twentieth century.

Drawing on his extensive fieldwork in living oral traditions and on the theoretical writings of Milman Parry, Lord concentrates on the singers and their art as manifested in texts of performance. In thirteen essays, some previously unpublished and all of them revised for book publication, he explores questions of composition, transmittal, and interpretation and raises important comparative issues. Individual chapters discuss aspects of the Homeric poems, South Slavic oral-traditional epics, the songs of Avdo Metedovic, Beowulf and Anglo-Saxon poetry, the medieval Greek Digenis Akritas and other medieval epics, central Asiatic and Balkan epics, the Finnish Kalevala, and the Bulgarian oral epic.

The work of one of the most respected scholars of his generation, Epic Singers and Oral Tradition will be an invaluable resource for scholars and students of myth and folklore, classicists, medievalists, Slavists, comparatists, literary theorists, and anthropologists.

About this title

About the Author:

Albert Bates Lord is Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor, Emeritus, of Slavic and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. He is the author of The Singer of Tales.

Review:

"A welcome publication.... The book contains eleven of his most important previously published articles and two studies which have not been published before.... There is something to be learned from every one of these studies."

(Classical Journal)

About this edition

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0801424720
• ISBN 13: 9780801424724
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 280