Epic Singers and Oral Tradition / / Albert Bates Lord.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Cornell University Press Archive Pre-2000
• VerfasserIn: Lord, Albert Bates,
• MitwirkendeR: Nagy, Gregory,
• Place / Publishing House: Ithaca, NY : : Cornell University Press, , [2018]; ©1991
• Year of Publication: 2018
• Language: English
• Series: Myth and Poetics
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (280 p.)

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 In thirteen essays, some previously unpublished and all of them revised for book publication, he explores questions of composition, transmittal, and interpretation and raises important comparative issues.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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Foreword -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- CHAPTER 1. Words Heard and Words Seen -- CHAPTER 2. Homer's Originality: Oral Dictated Texts -- CHAPTER 3. Homeric Echoes In Bihac -- CHAPTER 4. Avdo Mededovic, Guslar -- CHAPTER 5. Homer as an Oral-Traditional Poet -- CHAPTER 6. The Kalevala, the South Slavic Epics, and Homer -- CHAPTER 7. Beowulf and Odysseus -- CHAPTER 8. Interlocking Mythic Patterns in Beowulf -- CHAPTER 9. The Formulaic Structure of Introductions to Direct Discourse in Beowulf and Elene -- CHAPTER 10. The Influence of a Fixed Text -- CHAPTER 11. Notes on Digenis Akritas and Serbo-Croatian Epic -- CHAPTER 12. Narrative Themes in Bulgarian Oral-Traditional Epic and Their Medieval Roots -- CHAPTER 13. Central Asiatic and Balkan Epic -- Bibliography -- Index