The Singer of Tales

Couverture
Harvard University Press, 2000 - 307 pages

This 40th anniversary edition of Albert Lord's classic work includes a unique enhancement: a CD containing the original audio recordings of all the passages of heroic songs quoted in the book; a video publication of the kinescopic filming of the most valued of the singers; and selected photographs taken during Milman Parry's collecting trips in the Balkans.

Parry began recording and studying a live tradition of oral narrative poetry in order to find an answer to the age-old Homeric Question: How had the author of the Iliad and Odyssey composed these two monumental epic poems at the very start of Europe's literary tradition? Parry's, and with him Lord's, enduring contribution--set forth in Lord's The Singer of Tales--was to demonstrate the process by which oral poets compose.

Now reissued with a new Introduction and an invaluable audio and visual record, this widely influential book is newly enriched to better serve everyone interested in the art and craft of oral literature.

 

Table des matières

INTRODUCTION
3
SINGERS PERFORMANCE AND TRAINING
13
THE FORMULA
30
THE THEME
68
SONGS AND THE SONG
99
WRITING AND ORAL TRADITION
124
The Application
139
HOMER
141
THE ODYSSEY
158
THE ILIAD
186
SOME NOTES ON MEDIEVAL EPIC
198
APPENDICES
223
NOTES
277
INDEX
305
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À propos de l'auteur (2000)

Stephen A. Mitchell received an A.B. in Anthropology and Scandinavian Languages and Literatures from University of California, Berkeley and a Ph.D. in Scandinavian Languages and Literatures from the University of Minnesota. He is a Professor of Scandinavian and Folklore at Harvard University, and a curator of its Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature. His research and teaching focus on Nordic culture and literature, especially the popular traditions, mythologies, belief systems, and legends of the late medieval and early modern periods. He has written several books including Heroic Sagas and Ballads and Witchcraft and Magic in the Nordic Middle Ages. Gregory Nagy is Jones Professor of Classical Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature, Harvard University, and the Director of the Center for Hellenic Studies, Trustees for Harvard University.

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