1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910524675203321

Autore

Zumwalt Rosemary Lévy <1944->

Titolo

American Folklore Scholarship : A Dialogue of Dissent / / Rosemary Levy Zumwalt

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Indiana University Press, 1988

Bloomington : , : Indiana University Press, , 1988

©1988

ISBN

0-253-05554-7

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (1 online resource xiv, 186 pages.)

Collana

Folkloristics

Soggetti

Folklore - États-Unis - Histoire

Folklore

Folklore - United States - History

History

United States

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di contenuto

one: Discipline and Identity -- two: American Folklore Studies: Field and Scope -- three: The Schism in Folklore -- four: The Literary Folklorists -- five: The Anthropological Folklorists -- six: Approaches to Folklore: The Literary and the Anthropological -- seven: Remnants of the Past in the Present: Conflict in Contemporary Folklore Theory.

Sommario/riassunto

Rosemary Zumwalt examines the split between the literary folklorists and the anthropological folklorists during the period from 1888, when the American Folklore Society was founded, to the early 1940s, when control of the Journal of American Folklore by the anthropologists was ended. At the center of the conflict were concerns of professionalism, science, and academic discipline. For the literary folklorists, the orientation was toward literary works and the unwritten tradition from which they derived. Folklorists a·lso focused on the study of literary types or genres. Child and Kittredge studied the ballad; Thompson, the folktale; Taylor, the riddle and the proverb. In anthropology, study was directed toward cultures without writing, and the emphasis was on



fieldwork. Boas in his own writings, and in training his students, stressed collection of every aspect of the life of a people. And part of that material collected was folklore. The literary folklorists looked at literary forms for folklore while the anthropological folklorists looked at the life of the people and saw folklore only as part of it. Although this discipline-bound focus of the two factions created friction and led the two groups in different directions, it helped shape the development of the discipline in the United States.