Download or read book Letters to Ambrose Merton written by and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 82 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Choking Doberman And Other Urban Legends written by Jan Harold Brunvand and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 1984 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses over forty stories of improbable events told as true and embelished with local details which the author calls urban legends.
Download or read book The Baby Train and Other Lusty Urban Legends written by Jan Harold Brunvand and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 1994-10-17 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America's premier folk detective is back on the case, sniffing out those zany but dubious stories that "really happened" to a friend of your sister's boyfriend's accountant's mechanic. Jan Harold Brunvand—''Mr. Urban Legend" [Smithsonian]—tracks the most fabulous tales making today's cocktail-party circuit and shows why those stories that sound too good to be true probably are too good to be true. The eponymous episode—"The Baby Train"—sheds light on certain predawn activities that have linked unusually high birth rates to the whim of train schedule makers. Other stories offer a revealing peek behind the story of "The Exploding Bra," expose the embarrassing source of "The Hairdresser's Error," resurrect a "Failed Suicide" Buster Keaton would have died for, and show why adults are better off not bringing their comic book fantasies out of the closet. From "Superhero Hijinx" to "The Shocking Videotape" to "The Accidental Cannibal," The Baby Train uncovers the mysteries behind some of the bawdiest, goriest, funniest, most pyrotechnic urban legends yet.
Download or read book The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book written by Iona Archibald Opie and published by . This book was released on 1955 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity written by Robert K. Merton and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2006-01-22 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the names of cruise lines and bookstores to an Australian ranch and a nudist camp outside of Atlanta, the word serendipity--that happy blend of wisdom and luck by which something is discovered not quite by accident--is today ubiquitous. This book traces the word's eventful history from its 1754 coinage into the twentieth century--chronicling along the way much of what we now call the natural and social sciences. The book charts where the term went, with whom it resided, and how it fared. We cross oceans and academic specialties and meet those people, both famous and now obscure, who have used and abused serendipity. We encounter a linguistic sage, walk down the illustrious halls of the Harvard Medical School, attend the (serendipitous) birth of penicillin, and meet someone who "manages serendipity" for the U.S. Navy. The story of serendipity is fascinating; that of The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity, equally so. Written in the 1950s by already-eminent sociologist Robert Merton and Elinor Barber, the book--though occasionally and most tantalizingly cited--was intentionally never published. This is all the more curious because it so remarkably anticipated subsequent battles over research and funding--many of which centered on the role of serendipity in science. Finally, shortly after his ninety-first birthday, following Barber's death and preceding his own by but a little, Merton agreed to expand and publish this major work. Beautifully written, the book is permeated by the prodigious intellectual curiosity and generosity that characterized Merton's influential On the Shoulders of Giants. Absolutely entertaining as the history of a word, the book is also tremendously important to all who value the miracle of intellectual discovery. It represents Merton's lifelong protest against that rhetoric of science that defines discovery as anything other than a messy blend of inspiration, perspiration, error, and happy chance--anything other than serendipity.
Download or read book The folk lore record written by and published by . This book was released on 1879 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Following the Fishing written by David Butcher and published by . This book was released on 1987 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Cambridgeshire Customs and Folklore RLE Folklore written by Enid Porter and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-07-26 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Enid Porter spent many years collecting and recording from Cambridgeshire people the folk beliefs and customs held and observed in the country, both past and present. The subjects covered in the book, first published in 1969, range from the folklore of courtship, marriage, birth and death, of trees and plants and the whole world of nature to traditional Cambridgeshire food and drink; from ghosts and witchcraft and the cure of disease to charity and land-letting customs. The traditional occupations of the county, as well as the dress worn by the workers in the various crafts and the tools and implements they used, are also recorded, and there are accounts of various Cambridgeshire sports and pastimes. There is a section on University customs, ranging from the ancient procedure observed at examinations and degree ceremonies, through College Stamps and Mock Funerals, to the appointment made formerly of a Christmas Lord in the Colleges. Miss Porter spent most of her life in Cambridge and her mother’s family have lived there since the sixteenth century, so she includes information based on her own observations and on those of members of her family. The Fenland material has largely been provided by W. H. Barrett, well known through his collections of Fen Tales.
Download or read book Bodies written by Gillian Bennett and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2009-09-18 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Because they are so often told as news, contemporary legends force us to reevaluate life as we know it. They confront us with macabre, fantastic, horrific, or hilarious characters and events that seem to come straight out of myths and folktales, but are presented as present day events. The difficulty is that it is not at all easy to decide whether these often disturbing stories should be treated as reliable or dismissed as fantasy. The legends explored in this book are some of the most bizarre, gruesome, and politically sensitive stories in the contemporary legend canon. At any moment a body may be invaded by noxious creatures, deliberately infected with deadly disease, or raided to provide donor organs for sick foreigners. These are "winter's tales," the stuff of nightmares. In this book Gillian Bennett traces the cultural history of six legends, well-known in Europe and America from medieval times to the present day. Appearing in broadsides, ballads, myths, ancient and modern legends, novels, plays, films, television shows, and stories told in the oral tradition, these legends are not just silly tales which can be dismissed as trivial and untrue. They reveal much about the concerns and fears of everyday life and demonstrate the limits of knowledge and power in the modern world.
Download or read book Hereditary Genius written by Sir Francis Galton and published by . This book was released on 1870 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Folklore Genres written by Dan Ben-Amos and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 1981-04-01 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in Folklore Genres represent development in folklore genre studies, diverging into literary, ethnographic, and taxonomic questions. The study as a whole is concerned with the concept of genre and with the history of genre theory. A selective bibliography provides a guide to analytical and theoretical works on the topic. The literary-oriented articles conceive of folklore forms, not as the antecedents of literary genres, but as complex, symbolically rich expressions. The ethnographically oriented articles, as well as those dealing with classification problems, reveal dimensions of folklore that are often obscured from the student reading the folklore text alone. It has long been known that the written page is but a pale reproduction of the spoken word, that a tale hardly reflects the telling. The essays in this collection lead to an understanding of the forms of oral literature as multidimensional symbols of communication and to an understanding of folklore genres as systematically related conceptual categories in culture. What kinship terms are to social structure, genre terms are to folklore. Since genres constitute recognized modes of folklore speaking, their terminology and taxonomy can play a major role in the study of culture and society. The essays were originally published in Genre (1969–1971); introduction, bibliography, and index have been added to this edition.
Download or read book The Notes and Queries Folklore Column 1849 1947 written by Stephen Miller and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2021-08-18 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major source for England’s folklore heritage and vernacular culture is found in the Folklore Column in the periodical Notes and Queries which ran from 1849 to 1947. Previously, to locate material meant using each of the 15 General Indexes in turn. Instead, this book presents, for the first time, a consolidated index to the contents not only of the Folklore Column, but to other material of interest. Besides the index to Folklore entries itself with some 5,450 references alone, presented here are indexes to Nursery Rhymes, Phrases, Proverbs, Rhymes, Riddles, Songs and Ballads (1,722 titles are mentioned), Provincialisms, and Dialects. Overall, the Subject Indexes here contain in total 12,168 references. As such, this book presents the reader with ready access to a neglected corpus of material.
Download or read book Traditions of Belief written by Gillian Bennett and published by Penguin Group. This book was released on 1987 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Folk lore Record written by and published by . This book was released on 1880 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Contemporary Legend written by Gillian Bennett and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-05 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1996. For most of the time since the Grimm brothers first contrasted the fairy tale (Märchen) and the legend (Sage), the former has enjoyed the greater reputation among folklorists. Only in recent years, and with the work of such scholars as Gillian Bennett and Paul Smith, has it been recognized that—both as art and as news—the legend is now central to contemporary culture in a way that the Märchen no longer is. The present book is the first collection of essays on legend to appear in English since 1971. Nevertheless, its publication consolidates a gradual shift which has taken place over the last two decades, in which English-language scholarship has taken the lead in the study of certain kinds of legends—variously dubbed modern horror legends, urban legends, urban myths or, here, contemporary legends.
Download or read book A List of the Early Settlers of Georgia written by Ellis Merton Coulter and published by Genealogical Publishing Com. This book was released on 1983 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Information pertaining to each settler consists, generally, of name, age, occupation, place of origin, names of spouse, children and other family members, dates of embarkation and arrival, place of settlement, and date of death. In addition, some of the more notorious aspects of the settlers' lives are recounted in brief, telltale sketches.
Download or read book An Analytic Dictionary of the English Etymology written by Anatoly Liberman and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work introduces renowned linguistics scholar Anatoly Liberman's comprehensive dictionary and bibliography of the etymology of English words. The English etymological dictionaries published in the past claim to have solved the mysteries of word origins even when those origins have been widely disputed. An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology "by contrast, discusses all of the existing derivations of English words and proposes the best one. In the inaugural volume, Liberman addresses fifty-five words traditionally dismissed as being of unknown etymology. Some of the entries are among the most commonly used words in English, including man, boy, girl, bird, brain, understand, key, ever, " and yet." Others are slang: mooch, nudge, pimp, filch, gawk, " and skedaddle." Many, such as beacon, oat, hemlock, ivy," and toad," have existed for centuries, whereas some have appeared more recently, for example, slang, kitty-corner, " and Jeep." They are all united by their etymological obscurity. This unique resource book discusses the main problems in the methodology of etymological research and contains indexes of subjects, names, and all of the root words. Each entry is a full-fledged article, shedding light for the first time on the source of some of the most widely disputed word origins in the English language. "Anatoly Liberman is one of the leading scholars in the field of English etymology. Undoubtedly his work will be an indispensable tool for the ongoing revision of the etymological component of the entries in the Oxford English Dictionary."" --Bernhard Diensberg, OED" consultant, French etymologies Anatoly Liberman is professor of Germanic philology at the University of Minnesota. He has published many works, including 16 books, most recently Word Origins . . . and How We Know Them: Etymology for Everyone."
