Download Free The Theory Of Oral Composition Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online The Theory Of Oral Composition and write the review.

" . . . excellent book . . . " —The Classical Outlook " . . . brief and readable . . . There is good tonic in these pages for the serious student of oral tradition . . . a remarkable book." —Asian Folklore Studies "The bibliography is a boon for students and faculty at any level who are curious about the nature, composition, and performance of oral poetry." —Choice " . . . concise, evolutionary account . . . " —Religious Studies Review "As ever, Professor Foley's conscientious scholarship and sound judgements combine to make a further substantial contribution to the field." —E. C. Hawkesworth, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London, The Slavonic Review "Foley is probably the only scholar who is in a position even to suggest the extent of what we should know to work in this area." —Speculum "Foley's survey stands as a fitting tribute to the achievements of Parry and Lord and as a sure guide to future productive work in the field." —Journal of American Folklore " . . . detailed and informative study . . . We are fortunate that John Foley chose to write this book." —Motif " . . . Theory of Oral Composition . . . detailed account written in an elegant style which could serve equally as a textbook for college and graduate students and as a reference tool for scholars already in the field." —Olifant "As an 'introductory history,' The Theory of Oral Composition accomplishes its purpose admirably. It has the capacity to arouse interest on the part of the uninitiated." —Anthropologica Presents the first history of the new field of oral-formulaic theory, which arose from the pioneering research of Milman Parry and Albert Lord on the Homeric poems.
A major addition to the literature of poetry, Edward Hirsch’s sparkling new work is a compilation of forms, devices, groups, movements, isms, aesthetics, rhetorical terms, and folklore—a book that all readers, writers, teachers, and students of poetry will return to over and over. Hirsch has delved deeply into the poetic traditions of the world, returning with an inclusive, international compendium. Moving gracefully from the bards of ancient Greece to the revolutionaries of Latin America, from small formal elements to large mysteries, he provides thoughtful definitions for the most important poetic vocabulary, imbuing his work with a lifetime of scholarship and the warmth of a man devoted to his art. Knowing how a poem works is essential to unlocking its meaning. Hirsch’s entries will deepen readers’ relationships with their favorite poems and open greater levels of understanding in each new poem they encounter. Shot through with the enthusiasm, authority, and sheer delight that made How to Read a Poem so beloved, A Poet’s Glossary is a new classic.
Drawing on many examples including an American slam poet, a Tibetan paper-singer, a South African praise-poet, and an ancient Greek bard (Homer) the author shows that although oral poetry predates writing it continues to be a vital culture-making and communications tool. Based on research on epics, folktales, lyrics, laments, charms, etc.--Back cover.
This volume presents essays by leading scholars on the nature of orality as represented by the Homeric poems, and the effect of the oral way of thinking on the subsequent literate and literary development of ancient Greek and Roman culture.
"This is a splendid, rewarding book destined to reshape critical thinking about medieval poetry in English. Amodio combines groundbreaking theory with a deep, wide-ranging command of relevant scholarship to offer a uniquely inclusive perspective on an enormous and disparate collection of Old and Middle English poetry." --John Miles Foley, University of Missouri, Columbia "This is a well-conceived, well-structured, and well-written book that fills a significant gap in current scholarly discourse. Amodio is extremely well-informed about current oral theory, and presents a beautifully integrated thesis. This clear-sighted and provocative book both promises and delivers much." --Andy Orchard, University of Toronto Mark Amodio's book focuses on the influence of the oral tradition on written vernacular verse produced in England from the fifth to the fifteenth century. His primary aim is to explore how a living tradition articulated only through the public, performance voices of pre-literate singers came to find expression through the pens of private, literate authors. Amodio argues that the expressive economy of oral poetics survives in written texts because, throughout the Middle Ages, literacy and orality were interdependent, not competing, cultural forces. After delving into the background of the medieval oral-literate matrix, Writing the Oral Tradition develops a model of non-performative oral poetics that is a central, perhaps defining, component of Old English vernacular verse. Following the Norman Conquest, oral poetics lost its central position and became one of many ways to articulate poetry. Contrary to many scholars, Amodio argues that oral poetics did not disappear but survived well into the post-Conquest period. It influenced the composition of Middle English verse texts produced from the twelfth to the fourteenth century because it offered poets an affectively powerful and economical way to articulate traditional meanings. Indeed, fragments of oral poetics are discoverable in contemporary prose, poetics, and film as they continue to faithfully emit their traditional meanings.
This collection brings together newly commissioned and cutting-edge essays on oral text and tradition ranging from the ancient and medieval world to the present day by an international group of leading oral theorists drawn from Europe and North America. Using a range of materials including the Bible, Greek epic, Beowulf, Old Norse and Old English riddles, and medieval music, the contributors collectively work to refine, challenge, and further advance contemporary Oral Theory, an interdisciplinary school of thought heavily influenced by John Miles Foley, whose work provides the jumping-off point for this volume. The book includes a useful introduction to the history of oral theory, and Foley's ground-breaking and influential work.
Discusses the oral tradition as a theory of literary composition and its applications to Homeric and medieval epic.
"Milman Parry's comparative study of Homer and Southslavic oral song had demonstrated the existence of an oral tradition behind and within the Homeric Epic, thus establishing an indisputable link between Homer and oral poetry. Yet its exact nature has remained a moot point. For equally indisputable is the fact of the coexistence of oral and literate features within the Homeric Epic. Thus not behaving as either a straight oral song or as a straight literate text tout court, the Homeric Epic calls into question the prevailing Parryist axiom of the oral Homer. The link between Homer and oral poetry has thus become an open question again: it is, in fact, the New Homeric Question that turns on the roles of orality and literacy in the genesis of the Homeric Epic.To clarify it this book experiments with a third term: postorality. As a postoral poet, having initially been trained as an oral bard absorbing the Hellenic oral tradition, Homer would have acquired literacy in the course of his career as an oral singer. It enabled him to widen, deepen, and refine his epic art, thereby giving rise to an epic as complex and unique, in terms of structure, characterization, and intellectual substance, as the Iliad."--
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.
Ruth Finnegan's Oral Literature in Africa was first published in 1970, and since then has been widely praised as one of the most important books in its field. Based on years of fieldwork, the study traces the history of storytelling across the continent of Africa. This revised edition makes Finnegan's ground-breaking research available to the next generation of scholars. It includes a new introduction, additional images and an updated bibliography, as well as its original chapters on poetry, prose, "drum language" and drama, and an overview of the social, linguistic and historical background of oral literature in Africa. This book is the first volume in the World Oral Literature Series, an ongoing collaboration between OBP and World Oral Literature Project. A free online archive of recordings and photographs that Finnegan made during her fieldwork in the late 1960s is hosted by the World Oral Literature Project (http: //www.oralliterature.org/collections/rfinnegan001.html) and can also be accessed from publisher's website.