Jan Harold Brunvand can be credited for introducing to wide general audiences the concept of urban legends as a field of study. His popular books on the subject—The Vanishing Hitchhiker (1981), The Choking Doberman (1984), The Mexican Pet (1986), Curses! Broiled Again! (1989), and others—are familiar to folklorists and non-folklorists alike. Since his retirement in the late 1990s, Brunvand (now professor emeritus of English at the University of Utah) has continued his career-long dedication to legends, producing, among other works, the Encyclopedia of Urban Legends in 2001, which now has been updated and expanded into a hefty two volumes.
The text begins with a general introduction that defines the legend and traces the history of legend study as an academic endeavor, from the 1940s to the present. Brunvand surveys the dynamic evolution of the genre, from its roots as a predominantly oral narrative form to its myriad manifestations in popular culture and extensive propagation in the digital age. The book is a compendium of legend-related entries of varying length, most of which explicate individual legend “types” and provide summaries or sample texts (e.g., “The Roommate’s Death,” “The Kentucky Fried Rat,” and “The Killer in the Backseat”). The encyclopedia also contains entries on legend topics (e.g., “Hoaxes,” “Children,” “Computers,” and “Hunting”), legend themes (e.g., “Scandal,” “Revenge,” and “Embarrassment”), as well as terms related to theory and method (e.g., “Memorate,” “Performance,” “Ostension,” and “Stranger Danger”). Brunvand has expanded and more fully referenced the original 200 entries from the first edition, and he has added about 100 new entries covering other individual legends and additional general topics, such as “Disaster Rumors and Stories,” “Immigration Rumors,” and “Photographic Urban Legends.”
Perhaps the most significant addition to the expanded version is the appended legend type-index, based upon an earlier preliminary index that Brunvand included in The Baby Train (1993). Like the influential type and motif indexes that figured prominently in folktale studies of the first half of the twentieth century, Brunvand’s legend type-index is (conventionally) categorized according to content, the types providing skeletal plot summaries and story kernels. While scholars have questioned and debated the value of such an index for legend study, Brunvand has pressed ahead to develop a workable model. It is worth noting that urban legend researchers in Holland and Belgium have adopted Brunvand’s classification system, even labeling individual legend types with designated “Brunvand numbers” (using the abbreviated prefix BRUN). Still, it is unclear how useful a legend type-index would be to contemporary legend scholars who are motivated by entirely different paradigms than earlier generations of folktale scholars. The functionality remains to be seen; depending on the arc of future legend studies, Brunvand’s establishment of a legend type-index may or may not be considered a watershed moment for legend archivists in terms of the identification and classification of their material.
The first edition of The Encyclopedia of Urban Legends was a good general resource for legend study, and the revised one is even better. The number and extent of the emendations certainly merits the new edition. Like many such general reference books, this two-volume set may be cost prohibitive for individuals, but high school, university, and public libraries will likely find it a welcome—and frequently accessed—addition to their reference collections.
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[Review length: 549 words • Review posted on September 17, 2013]