Search

The article presents the discussion on Prioress's Tale from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales remains relevant today, reflecting on persistent bigotries and the complexities of historical and contemporary antisemitism. Topics include tale's reflection on cultural and ethical transformations and the impact of political extremism and racism; and the ongoing dialogue between medieval and modern contexts.

The article presents the discussion on extending to the legacy of her tales in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in France, Great Britain, and Germany. Topics include collections of Mother Bunch and Queen Mab, this prolific heritage of d'Aulnoy's tales in German-speaking countries often remaining underexplored and deserves further investigation; and adaptability of tales across various cultures and languages, attests to her storytelling prowess and the timeless appeal of her narratives.

The paper examines the much neglectedfemale trickster in African American novel. The novels of Andre Lorde exhibit a new approach to the novelistic tradition that is rooted in the distinct and diverse cultural traditions of the African Americans. She has weaved in myths andfolk tales in the narratives as a resistance to the west inspired empirical worldview. Tricksters in her novels resurface not just as a disruptive figure but also as rhetorical principle. The trickster motif in the novel however has been used before by earlier black female writers like Zora Neale Hurston. But the trickster figures in the contemporary writings by black female authors like Lorde no longer resort to subterfuge and subversive strategies that was earlier regarded as necessary to create a niche for the African Americans in the white society. The female tricksters in her novels act as a bindingforce that revitalizes the community by making space for contrasting voices and perspectives. The trickster in her novels becomes the symbols of black identity and cultural strength by blasting monolithic stereotypes about African American women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting from Igbo Landing, site of an 1803 slave rebellion off coastal Georgia, this article compares written and folkloric accounts to question the status of the archive in early American studies. Ongoing stories of the Flying African, linked to the site, suggest space rather than time or periodization as the most useful rubric for framing early Americanist studies today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Fact vs. Fancy" details the extent of Nathaniel Hawthorne's use of four specific newspapers from 1739--the Boston Weekly News-Letter, the Boston Gazette, the New England Weekly Journal, and the Boston Evening-Post--as source material for his sketch "Old News I." Demonstrating the care with which Hawthorne drew from the papers, the essay also proposes a likely timeline for the composition of "Old News I," sets it within the context of Hawthorne's early experimentation with forms and sources, and argues that it likely began as a part of Hawthorne's Provincial Tales project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the Brer Rabbit trickster tales of enslaved African Americans. It challenges earlier interpretations of scholars who view the world of Brer Rabbit as amoral and anarchic. Lawrence Levine, for example, claimed that friendship was portrayed as a ‘fragile reed’ in the Brer Rabbit tales. Instead, this article argues that Brer Rabbit did not live in an amoral world; rather, he lived in a world of ethical boundaries. Indeed, friendship, altruism, and commitment to vulnerable members of the community were prized – not derided. For enslaved people in the United States, these values were crucial for survival; yet historians have failed to pay sufficient attention to these themes in the tales. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men reveals that African Americans were able to revise, restructure, and reformulate African orature to fit their social, political, and spiritual needs. This study examines the transformation of Yoruba ese Ifá (Ifá divination verses) into folktales and analyzes the similarities and divergences in the content and characters of the orature. This essay highlights the subtle ways that African Americans politicized and revolutionized the ese Ifá to protect the verses' wisdom and facilitate their proliferation. The revised ese Ifá, disguised as innocuous folktales, were central to the formation of the African American world- view because they reminded dislocated Africans that divinity was not restricted to an invisible entity or controlled by a select few but was both an inheritance and an imperative essential for liberation and self-actualization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]