9780812221077-0812221079-Homo Narrans: The Poetics and Anthropology of Oral Literature

Homo Narrans: The Poetics and Anthropology of Oral Literature

ISBN-13: 9780812221077
ISBN-10: 0812221079
Edition: Illustrated
Author: John D Niles
Publication date: 2010
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Format: Paperback 296 pages
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Book details

ISBN-13: 9780812221077
ISBN-10: 0812221079
Edition: Illustrated
Author: John D Niles
Publication date: 2010
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Format: Paperback 296 pages

Summary

Homo Narrans: The Poetics and Anthropology of Oral Literature (ISBN-13: 9780812221077 and ISBN-10: 0812221079), written by authors John D Niles, was published by University of Pennsylvania Press in 2010. With an overall rating of 4.5 stars, it's a notable title among other Folklore & Mythology (Social Sciences, Cultural, Anthropology) books. You can easily purchase or rent Homo Narrans: The Poetics and Anthropology of Oral Literature (Paperback) from BooksRun, along with many other new and used Folklore & Mythology books and textbooks. And, if you're looking to sell your copy, our current buyback offer is $6.99.

Description

It would be difficult to imagine what human life would be like without stories—from myths recited by Pueblo Indian healers in the kiva, ballads sung in Slovenian market squares, folktales and legends told by the fireside in Italy, to jokes told at a dinner table in Des Moines—for it is chiefly through storytelling that people possess a past.

In Homo Narrans John D. Niles explores how human beings shape their world through the stories they tell. The book vividly weaves together the study of Anglo-Saxon literature and culture with the author's own engagements in the field with some of the greatest twentieth-century singers and storytellers in the Scottish tradition. Niles ponders the nature of the storytelling impulse, the social function of narrative, and the role of individual talent in oral tradition. His investigation of the poetics of oral narrative encompasses literary works, such as the epic poems and hymns of early Greece and the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf, texts that we know only through written versions but that are grounded in oral technique.

That all forms of narrative, even the most sophisticated genres of contemporary fiction, have their ultimate origin in storytelling is a point that scarcely needs to be argued. Niles's claims here are more ambitious: that oral narrative is and has long been the chief basis of culture itself, that the need to tell stories is what distinguishes humans from all other living creatures.

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