The Greenwood Folklore Handbooks are designed as reference sources for high school and undergraduate students. Recent volumes include Elizabeth Tucker’s Campus Legends , Wolfgang Mieder’s Proverbs , and James Dow’s German Folklore . Jacqueline Thursby’s new book is an accessible and interesting contribution to this series. It will serve as a useful introduction to major storytelling genres and significant texts, and the book also provides a helpful overview of important scholarship about folklore.
Story: A Handbook follows a familiar template used in other volumes. The first chapter is an introduction to the history of research on storytelling and an overview of subsequent themes within the study of folk narratives. Thursby demonstrates that storytelling is a contemporary art. The focus of this chapter, however, is on the history of various genres, typically within the ancient context of classical mythology and epics. Chapter Two focuses on definitions and classifications of narratives and verbal art. Thursby first references Aristotle’s contributions to literary criticism by focusing on his discussion of plot. She then extends Aristotle’s analysis into the system of story elements designed by Gustav Freytag. Thursby shows how these elements are components of a range of stories by demonstrating how elements such as exposition, rising action, climax, and denouement are evident in movies and television shows as well as within journalism, historical literature, digital storytelling, and fan fiction. The bulk of this lengthy chapter, however, is a delineation of major folkloric genres.
Chapter Three, "Examples and Texts," is an illustration and presentation of select versions of representative samples of the various genres. Thursby includes some fine variants of a range of stories. She includes stories from classical sources and gives special attention to Ovid’s Metamorphoses and as well as to Middle Eastern myths and epics. This chapter also includes numerous texts from Anglo-American, Japanese, and European traditions, with a few references to African-American and American Indian narrative traditions. Because some of the narratives are far too lengthy for this chapter, Thursby provides concise summaries of major epics such as Gilgamesh , the Ramayana , and The Thousand and One Nights . Telling the stories in summary form generally is an effective technique, but Thursby includes only limited bibliographic references for finding the array of translations of these works. Along with a wealth of texts arranged into genres, this chapter includes a good discussion of other ways to classify and analyze narratives. Thursby provides a useful application of Propp’s morphological scheme by delineating ways in which his thirty-one functions are evident in a range of narratives.
The fourth chapter is an overview of scholarship and approaches used by folklorists. Essentially, it is an updating of Richard Dorson’s discussion of folklore theories from his 1972 textbook, Folklore and Folklife: An Introduction . Thursby’s explanations are clear, and she chooses relevant examples of contemporary scholarship to explain how these theories are used. In places, the discussion is a bit too abstract for the book’s audience, and her presentation of theories would have been strengthened by a more precise use of the theories to interpret specific texts for a non-specialized audience. This chapter also wanders a bit away from storytelling as she also includes other fields of folklore such as folk art, material culture, foodways, and folk medicine. Following this chapter, Thursby concludes her book with the last chapter, entitled "Contexts." The chapter is a broadly ranged discussion of various contexts for storytelling throughout history and across cultures. In her conclusion, Thursby emphasizes continuities between older, even ancient, contexts for storytelling and the manifestation of folkloric elements of narratives within contemporary media.
The book succeeds as a handbook for beginning students and a general audience. The arrangement is logical and helpful, and readers will find Thursby’s bibliographic references to be valuable sources for finding good compilations and further scholarship. The book has some factual mistakes and errors in proofreading and formatting; Freytag’s famous pyramid is inexplicably presented twice on the very same page. Thursby also mistakenly refers to the American Folklore Society as the American Folklore Academy in one reference, and she represents bluegrass as "Appalachian." She also references Zora Neale Hurston’s birthplace as Eatonville, Florida, whereas Hurston actually was born in Notasugla, Alabama. She also equates applied folklore with public sector folklore, a common and misleading mistake because many academic folklorists also engage in applied folklore and it is highly debatable whether or not all public sector folklore is applied research. Thursby also uses outdated terms such as "foodlore" whereas "foodways" is well established in the lexicon of folklorists and anthropologists, and she sometimes uses the popularized term "urban myth" whereas the majority of folklorists are fairly vehement about labeling these stories as "legends."
There are wider conceptual problems, however, with the second and third chapters. Although Thursby does provide good introductions to numerous genres, the system that she presents is not always consistent and may confuse readers who are new to folklore scholarship. For example, after her good description of recognizable genres such as Märchen , fables, and animal tales, the discussion wanders into areas of folklore that are not necessarily genres. "Folk narrative" does not work as a genre classification, and forms such as "frame tales" and "complex tales" are better seen as narrative devices rather than as genres. This blending of genre with other ways of classifying folklore is likely to confuse readers, and the problem could have been solved by a clear explanation of the idea of genre within folklore studies. Readers also will be challenged by some of the repetition in both chapters. Chapter Three revisits the organization scheme that Thursby presents, but the focus is on specific tales. The explanation would have been much clearer if more texts were provided in Chapter Two to illustrate the salient aspects of each genre as it is defined.
There are some fine examples of numerous texts, and Thursby provides a useful overview of key ideas within the scholarship. She makes references to the scholarship of numerous folklorists, but there are some major oversights. Highlighting Joseph Campbell’s writing on myth without even mentioning the more significant theories of Claude Lévi-Strauss is a major omission. Thursby also mentions contemporary folklorists who have been active in the field, but she sometimes breezes over their specific contributions and often does not include references to their writing in her bibliography.
Brokering an understanding of academic folklore to a non-specialized audience is challenging. The book’s introduction and conclusion are perhaps the most successful chapters for introducing scholarship on folk narratives to a wider audience. Thursby’s writing style will also draw readers into the stories that she presents in an engaging manner. The handbook will be useful as an introduction and reference source, but due to the selective nature of the scholarship presented, the ambiguities in presentation, and the problems with integrating theory with subject matter, the book will be of limited value for introductory folklore classes.
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[Review length: 1139 words • Review posted on April 19, 2007]