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Folklore has been described as the unwritten literature of a culture: its songs, stories, sayings, games, rituals, beliefs, and ways of life. Encyclopedia of American Folklore helps readers explore topics, terms, themes, figures, and issues related to this popular subject. This comprehensive reference guide addresses the needs of multiple audiences, including high school, college, and public libraries, archive and museum collections, storytellers, and independent researchers. Its content and organization correspond to the ways educators integrate folklore within literacy and wider learning objectives for language arts and cultural studies at the secondary level. This well-rounded resource connects United States folk forms with their cultural origin, historical context, and social function. Appendixes include a bibliography, a category index, and a discussion of starting points for researching American folklore. References and bibliographic material throughout the text highlight recently published and commonly available materials for further study. Coverage includes: Folk heroes and legendary figures, including Paul Bunyan and Yankee Doodle Fables, fairy tales, and myths often featured in American folklore, including'Little Red Riding Hood'and'The Princess and the Pea'American authors who have added to or modified folklore traditions, including Washington Irving Historical events that gave rise to folklore, including the civil rights movement and the Revolutionary War Terms in folklore studies, such as fieldwork and the folklife movement Holidays and observances, such as Christmas and Kwanzaa Topics related to folklore in everyday life, such as sports folklore and courtship/dating folklore Folklore related to cultural groups, such as Appalachian folklore and African-American folklore and more.

Literature Suppressed on Social Grounds, Fourth Edition discusses the many works that have been banned over the centuries because they offended or merely ignored official truths; challenged widely held assumptions; or contained ideas or language unacceptable to a state, religious institution, or private moral watchdog. Entries include: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (Sherman Alexie) Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain) The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll) Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl (Anne Frank) As I Lay Dying (William Faulkner) Beloved (Toni Morrison) The Color Purple (Alice Walker) Drama (Raina Telgemeier) Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury) The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) Howl and Other Poems (Allen Ginsberg) I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Maya Angelou) The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini) One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Ken Kesey) Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck) To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee) and more.

Throughout history, tyrants, totalitarian states, church institutions, and democratic governments alike have banned books that challenged their assumptions or questioned their activities. Political suppression also occurs in the name of security and the safeguarding of official secrets and is often used as a weapon in larger cultural or political battles. Literature Suppressed on Political Grounds, Fourth Edition illustrates the extent and frequency of such censorship in nearly every form of writing. Entries include: Animal Farm (George Orwell) The Appointment (Herta Müller) Born on the Fourth of July (Ron Kovic) Burger's Daughter (Nadine Gordimer) Cancer Ward (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn) Doctor Zhivago (Boris Pasternak) The Fugitive (Pramoedya Anata Toer) Girls of Riyadh (Rajaa Alsanea) The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck) Gulliver's Travels (Jonathan Swift) The Hate U Give (Angie Thomas) The Jungle (Upton Sinclair) Kiss of the Spider Woman (Manuel Puig) Manifesto of the Communist Party (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels) Les Misérables (Victor Hugo) Mein Kampf (Adolf Hitler) Slaughterhouse-Five (Kurt Vonnegut Jr.) Snow (Orhan Pamuk) The Struggle Is My Life (Nelson Mandela) The Things They Carried (Tim O'Brien) The Vaněk Plays (Václav Havel) and more.

This volume contains a selection of nine essays with an interdisciplinary perspective. They were originally presented at the Sixth International Conference on Word and Music Studies, which was held at Edinburgh University in June 2007 and was organized by the International Association for Word and Music Studies (WMA).The contributions to this volume focus on self-reference in various systematic, historical and intermedial ways. Self-reference – including, as a special case, metareference (the self-conscious reflection on music, literature and other medial concerns) – is explored, among others, in instrumental music by Mozart, Mahler and Satie, in the structure and performance of (meta-)operas, in operatic adaptations of drama and filmic adaptations of opera, as well as in intermedial novelistic references to music. The essays cover a historical range from the 18th century to the present and are of interest to literary and opera scholars and students, musicologists as well as all readers generally interested in medial self-reference and intermediality studies.

Here David Ellison explores the problems encountered by France's best experimental authors writing between 1956 and 1984, when faced with the question:'What should my writing be about?'These years are characterized by the rise of the'new novelists,'who questioned the representational function of writing as they created works of imagination that turned in upon themselves and away from exterior reality. It became fashionable at one point to affirm that literature was no longer about the world but uniquely about the words on a page, the signifying surface of the text. Ellison tests this assumption, showing that even in the most seemingly self-referential fictions the words point to the world from which they can never completely separate themselves.Through close readings Ellison examines the novels and theoretical writings of authors whose works are fundamental to our perception of contemporary French writing and thought: Camus, Robbe-Grillet, Simon, Duras, Sarraute, Blanchot, and Beckett. The result is a new understanding of the link between the referential function of literary language and the problematic of the ethics of fiction.