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The drive to pass down stories from generation to generation is a trait that cultures across the world have in common. Some of these fascinating stories are called folktales, and many are still beloved hundreds of years after they were first told. Readers will learn the characteristics that folktales across cultures share. They'll discover that fables, fairy tales, and tall tales all fall within this category, and they'll learn famous examples of each, such as the Tortoise and the Hare, Paul Bunyan, and Cinderella. The compelling narrative is accompanied by appealing artwork.

This introduction to the Russian folktale considers the origin, structure and language of folktales; tale-tellers and their audiences; the relationship of folktales to Russian ritual life; and the folktale types which are translated in subsequent volumes of "The Complete Russian Folktale."

The book uncovers the versatility and literary skills of oral narrators in a small African island. Relying on the researches of three French ethnographers who interviewed storytellers in the 1970s-80s, Lee Haring shows a once-colonised people using verbal art to preserve ancient values in the postcolonial world, when the island of Mayotte was transforming itself from a neglected colony to an overseas department of France.

The author's innovation is to read ethnographic researches as play scripts—to see printed folktales as accounts of live performances. One storyteller after another comments symbolically on what it is like to be a formerly colonised population. Storytelling women, in particular, combine diverse plots and characters to create traditional-sounding stories, which could not have been predicted from the African, Malagasy, Indian, and European traditions coexisting in Mayotte. Haring's account shows them to be particularly skilled at irony and ambiguity, conveying both submissive and rebellious attitudes in their tales. He makes Mayotte storytelling accessible to a new, English-speaking audience and demonstrates that traditional storytellers in those years were preserving, but also critiquing, their inherited social order in a changing world. Their creative intentions, cultural influences and widely different narrative styles constitute Mayotte's system of the arts of the word.

Literary specialists, folklore enthusiasts, and people who like reading stories will find much to appreciate in this engaging and sophisticated book.

How to Read a Folktale offers the first English translation of Ibonia, a spellbinding tale of old Madagascar. Ibonia is a folktale on epic scale. Much of its plot sounds familiar: a powerful royal hero attempts to rescue his betrothed from an evil adversary and, after a series of tests and duels, he and his lover are joyfully united with a marriage that affirms the royal lineage. These fairytale elements link Ibonia with European folktales, but the tale is still very much a product of Madagascar. It contains African-style praise poetry for the hero; it presents Indonesian-style riddles and poems; and it inflates the form of folktale into epic proportions. Recorded when the Malagasy people were experiencing European contact for the first time, Ibonia proclaims the power of the ancestors against the foreigner. Through Ibonia, Lee Haring expertly helps readers to understand the very nature of folktales. His definitive translation, originally published in 1994, has now been fully revised to emphasize its poetic qualities, while his new introduction and detailed notes give insight into the fascinating imagination and symbols of the Malagasy. Haring's research connects this exotic narrative with fundamental questions not only of anthropology but also of literary criticism.

"Japanese Animal-Wife Tales is an instructive book particularly for cross-cultural analysis of the themes of animal-wife tales in Japan, Scotland, and Korea. It is recommended to anyone who is interested in animal-wife folktales and folktales in general."(Noriko T. Reider, Western Folklore 75.2)

This is the long-awaited publication of a set of writings by the British philosopher, historian, and archaeologist R.G. Collingwood (1889-1943) on critical, anthropological, and cultural themes only hinted at in his previously available work. At the core are six essays on folktale and magic in which Collingwood applies the principles of his philosophy of history to problems in the long-term evolution of human society and culture. The volume opens with three substantial introductory essays by the editors, authorities in their various fields, who provide their explanatory and contextual notes to