Small Island de Andrea Levy; The Buddha of Suburbia de Hanif Kureishi; White Teeth de Zadie Smith et Brick Lane de Monica Ali.

 

 

 

 

The present volume is a collection of papers presented in various national and international seminars from 1980's to 2019. The papers cover all genres of narrative namely tale, legend and myth; in addition to that, papers on episodes from the great Indian Itihasas, Ramayana and Mahabharata, have been included. Researches on folktales and mythology from other cultures and languages have been published in general, in abundance, and some on Tamil folktales and mythology by great authors have appeared on the international arena.

All three genres are related, in the sense they are narratives, and not related, in the sense they have their own characteristics. As the humour in Tamil folktales is unique, and the story telling techniques are intelligent, the characters in the tales are down to earth, the concepts found in Tamil myths are very ancient, some of the interesting tales, myths and legends were chosen by the author to introduce them to the non- Tamil world and scholars.

The two great Itihasas of India are well known to the world in general; but the episodes with   indigenous and ingenious ideas of Tamil people are to be known to the world. Hence they have been included in the collection. It is hoped that the present volume would be appreciated by the non- Tamil readers and scholars of Folklore and mythology, especially folk narrative research would find it useful.

 

Mohamed Karim Dhouib

 

Stimulated by the aspiration to talk with the past, this book relocates the Canterbury Tales in its historical context to uncover the cultural, social, and economic traces suppressed and refigured in the process of literary representation. It examines the ideological strategies and collective beliefs in the midst of the cultural and socio-economic crises of medieval England and explains how these crises traversed the Tales. It tries to integrate the textual and the social and resituate the cultural traces and social energies encoded in the Tales.

 

In working through literary traditions of generic and stylistic difference, Geoffrey Chaucer assimilates his vision of the medieval social energy into a discursive construct that absorbs the diversity of late fourteenth-century reality. Under the umbrella of the festive pilgrimage, Chaucer makes room for the lower-class pilgrims to subvert the medieval weltanschauung and its theologically-grounded culture as bodied forth in the Boethianised and epicised Knight’s Tale. However, the seditious seeds, grown in disruptive tales like the Miller’s and Wife of Bath’s, are infused with subtexts that undo and contain the subversive potential. The sense of containment receives further emphasis in the Clerk’s Tale, the Parson’s Tale, and the Retractions which, in their affirmation of the reigning orthodoxies, preach submission to all forms of authority (fatherly, husbandly, feudal, and divine).

 

ISBN 9783969390238. LINCOM Studies in Language and Literature 24. 132pp. 2020.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Folklore”, a word suggested by William John Thoms in place of the cumbersome phrase “popular antiquities” on August 22, 1846, caught on and proved its value in defining a new area of knowledge and subject of inquiry. Folklore can be broadly classified into two divisions namely verbal and nonverbal. Scholars have classified it into four divisions such as Oral literature, material culture, social folk custom and performing arts. But the broad classification of folklore as verbal and nonverbal takes care of the latter.

Tamil verbal folklore is Tamil oral literature, that can be classified into folk narrative, folk song, ballad, proverb and riddle. Each division has again several subdivisions. The present volume has taken up various topics for analysis namely Process of hearing in village judicial system, Gift giving, Relationship between a literary epic and its folk counterpart, Indigenous health traditions, Protest, Indigenous medicine and Taboos that are revealed/explained in verbal folklore.

The nonverbal folklore comprises customs, festivals, religion, games, gestures, music, architecture, crafts and art, folk costumes and foods, folk dances and dramas, and a major chunk of material culture, known as physical folklife. Topics namely Function of folk costume, Hearing in Caste panchyats, Persuasion as a sign, Folk customs, the Bow song and Food as a code have been taken for discussion in part 2, Nonverbal folklore. Also scholars from the fields of Linguistics, Sociology and Psychology will be benefited by this book.