harmonious social life.Italian Canadian Luisa Del Giudice looks at the rich Italian variants of the traditional gastronomic utopia called Il Paese di Cuccagna, the Land of Cockaigne, "a mythic land of plenty where rivers run with 'milk and honey' (wine, beer, coffee, or rum), food falls like manna from heaven, work is banished, and no one ever grows old" and considers its persistence in immigrant worldview. From New Delhi, Sadhana Naithani examines the "preface-d space" that as India, colonial British authors imagined and passed on to readers in formulaic prefaces to collections of Indian folklore. Reimund Kvideland, of Norway, and Gerald Porter, an English scholar teaching in Finland, show how nineteenth-century Norwegian and English railway navvies (itinerant laborers) idealized their low-status occupations in song. In a second essay, Gerald Porter demonstrates through broadside ballad texts the role of caricatures of the Welsh, Scottish, and Irish in constructing "Englishness." Turks were among the "others" Germans demonized, as Tom Cheesman, who teaches in Wales, explains in his paper on their historical representations in German street ballads. Cozette Griffin-Kremer of France paints a sweeping picture of the landscape of the mind that written and popular traditions of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales built around bovine bodies, the human-cow partnership, and the mysteries of domestication, thereby providing conceptions of transcendence of the human condition. Finally, Vaira Freibergs, a scholar and the current president of Latvia, explains the images of longing for idealized childhood homes that married women, exiled by a patrilocal culture, expressed in Latvian folksong. |