- Armenian and Iranian Studies
- This book brings together select articles published in disparate journals and volumes over the past two decades. Some deal exclusively with either Armeniaca (ancient, medieval, and modern) or Iranica (pre-Islamic); in the case of the former, there is an emphasis on the sources and religious material of heroic epic and of folklore. A number of studies also deal with the visionaries of the Armenian tradition--Mashtots', Narekats'i, Ch'arents'. In the Iranian area, there are publications on Irano-Judaica and the culture of the Parsi Zoroastrians of India.
- Hardcover 2005
- Embroidered with Gold, Strung with Pearls
- Bosnian traditional ballads have intrigued many by their beauty and eloquence, from Goethe's poetic interest in them in the eighteenth century to the work of twentieth-century scholars such as Milman Parry and Albert Lord. These songs are now available to the English reader in a bilingual edition offering a selection of never before translated or published materials from Harvard University's Parry Collection. The forty oral ballads, many appearing in multiple versions, were performed by Bosnian women and gathered in the Gacko region of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1930s. Using Parry and Lord as a starting point, Vidan supplements their theories with broader ethnological, cultural, and historical data.
- Paperback 2003
- Hesiod, I, Theogony. Works and Days. Testimonia
- Hesiod's exact dates are unknown, but he has often been considered a younger contemporary of Homer. This volume of the new Loeb Classical Library edition contains his two extant poems, along with a selection of testimonia from a wide variety of ancient sources.
- Hardcover 2007
- The Holy Grail
- Barber traces the history of the legends surrounding the Grail, beginning with Chrétien de Troyes's great romances of the twelfth century and the medieval Church's religious version of the secular ideal. He pursues the myths through Victorian obsessions and enthusiasms to the popular bestsellers of the late twentieth century that have embraced its mysteries. From Lancelot to Parsifal, chivalric romances to Wagner's Ring, T. S. Eliot to Monty Python, the Grail has fascinated and lured the Western imagination from beyond the reach of the ordinary world.
- Hardcover 2004 / Paperback 2005
- Jump Jim Crow
- Beginning in the 1830s, the white actor Thomas D. Rice took to the stage as Jim Crow, and the ragged and charismatic trickster of black folklore entered--and forever transformed--American popular culture. Jump Jim Crow brings together for the first time the plays and songs performed in this guise and reveals how these texts code the complex use and abuse of blackness that has characterized American culture ever since Jim Crow's first appearance.
- Hardcover 2003
- Land of the Millrats
- For this book Dorson extended his search for folk traditions to one of the most heavily industrialized sections of the United States. Can folklore be found, he wondered, in the Calumet Region of northwest Indiana? In his usual entertaining style, Dorson shows that a rich and varied folklore exists. Land of the Millrats, though it depicts a special place, speaks for much of America.
- Hardcover 1981
- The Life of Washington
- The effect of this "single, immortal, and dubious anecdote," and others like it, has made this book one of the most influential in the history of American folklore. The first republication of the book since 1927, it is unique in its detailed commentary on Weems and other biographers of Washington.
- Hardcover 1962 / Paperback
- Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry
- A brilliant study of the continuing and changing uses of classical mythology in English poetry, this book treats most of the major and many of the minor English poets since 1680 and includes a chapter on the use of myth in American verse. It provides an illuminating overview of English poetry since the end of the Renaissance.
- Hardcover 1969
- The Pack of Autolycus
- Hardcover 1969
- The Poet as Mythmaker
- Hardcover 1982
- Rai Mythology
The more than two dozen Rai languages in eastern Nepal, which make up the larger part of the Kiranti language family, are linguistically highly varied. This volume, which includes introductory chapters to Rai mythology and Rai grammar, for the first time brings together different variants of myths from various Rai languages, presenting them with linguistic glossings in interlinear translations. The book is of special interest to linguists, anthropologists, and folklorists with a focus on the Himalayas.
- Hardcover 2009
- Stagolee Shot Billy
- Although his story has been told countless times--by performers from Ma Rainey, Cab Calloway, and the Isley Brothers to Ike and Tina Turner, James Brown, and Taj Mahal--no one seems to know who Stagolee really is. How the legend grew is a story in itself, and Cecil Brown tracks it through variants of the song "Stack Lee"--from early ragtime versions of the '20s right up to the hip-hop renderings of the '90s. Brown describes the powerful influence of a legend bigger than literature, one whose transformation reflects changing views of black musical forms, and African Americans' altered attitudes toward black male identity, gender, and police brutality.
- Hardcover 2003 / Paperback 2004