In Folklore Figures of French and Creole Louisiana, Nathan J. Rabalais examines the impact of Louisiana's remarkably diverse cultural and ethnic groups on folklore characters and motifs during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Establishing connections between Louisiana and France, West Africa, Canada, and the Antilles, Rabalais explores how folk characters, motifs, and morals adapted to their new contexts in Louisiana. By viewing the state's folklore in the light of its immigration history, he demonstrates how folktales can serve as indicators of sociocultural adaptation as well as contact among cultural communities. In particular, he examines the ways in which collective traumas experienced by Louisiana's major ethnic groups-slavery, the grand d? (R)rangement, linguistic discrimination-resulted in fundamental changes in these folktales in relation to their European and African counterparts. Rabalais points to the development of an altered moral economy in Cajun and Creole folktales. Conventional heroic qualities, such as physical strength, are subverted in Louisiana folklore in favor of wit and cunning. Analyses of Black Creole animal tales like those of Bouki et Lapin and Tortie demonstrate the trickster hero's ability to overcome both literal and symbolic entrapment through cleverness. Some elements of Louisiana's folklore tradition, such as the rougarou and cauchemar, remain an integral presence in the state's cultural landscape, apparent in humor, popular culture, regional branding, and children's books. Through its adaptive use of folklore, French and Creole Louisiana will continue to retell old stories in innovative ways as well as create new stories for future generations.

Born into a wealthy and privileged family in Philadelphia, Charles Godfrey Leland (1824-1903) showed a clear interest in the supernatural and occult literature during his youth. Legend has it that, soon after his birth, an old Dutch nurse carried him up to the garret of the house and performed a ritual to guarantee that Leland would be fortunate in his life and eventually become a scholar and a wizard. Whether or not this incident ever occurred, we do know that his interest in fairy tales, folklore, and the supernatural would eventually lead him to a life of travel and documentation of the stories of numerous groups across the United States and Europe. Jack Zipes selected the tales in Charles Godfrey Leland and His Magical Talesfrom five different books- The Algonquin Legends (1884), Legends of Florence (1895-96), The Unpublished Letters of Virgil (1901), The English Gypsies (1882), and Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune-Telling (1891)-and has arranged them thematically. Though these tales cannot be considered authentic folk tales-not written verbatim from the lips of Romani, Native Americans, or other sources of the tales-they are highly significant because of their historical and cultural value. Like most of the aspiring American folklorists of his time, who were mainly all white, male, and from the middle classes, Leland recorded these tales in personal encounters with his informants or collected them from friends and acquaintances, before grooming them for publication so that they became translations of the original narratives. What distinguishes Leland from the major folklorists of the nineteenth century is his literary embellishment to represent his particular regard for their poetry, purity, and history. Readers with an interest in folklore, oral tradition, and nineteenth-century literature will value this curated and annotated glimpse into a breadth of work.

Jeanne Pitre Soileau, winner of the 2018 Chicago Folklore Prize and the 2018 Opie Prize for Yo' Mama, Mary Mack, and Boudreaux and Thibodeaux: Louisiana Children's Folklore and Play, vividly presents children's voices in What the Children Said: Child Lore of South Louisiana. Including over six hundred handclaps, chants, jokes, jump-rope rhymes, cheers, taunts, and teases, this book takes the reader through a fifty-year history of child speech as it has influenced children's lives. What the Children Said affirms that children's play in south Louisiana is acquired along a network of summer camps, schoolyards, church gatherings, and sleepovers with friends. When children travel, they obtain new games and rhymes, and bring them home. The volume also reveals, in the words of the children themselves, how young people deal with racism and sexism. The children argue and outshout one another, policing their own conversations, stating their own prejudices, and vying with one another for dominion. The first transcript in the book tracks a conversation among three related boys and shows that racism is part of the family interchange. Among second grade boys and girls at a Catholic school another transcript presents numerous examples in which boys use insults to dominate a conversation with girls, and girls use giggles and sly comebacks to counter this aggression. Though collected in the areas of New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Lafayette, Louisiana, this volume shows how south Louisiana child lore is connected to other English-speaking places: England, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand, as well as the rest of the United States.

For as long as humans have inhabited the earth, we have lived alongside the multitude of other creatures with which we share our planet. However it is undoubtedly true that today most of us are not as close to the animals around us as our forebears were, and that many of the world's best loved large mammals and most beautiful birds are in danger of becoming extinct. The threats of the 21st century to the animal world make it even more pertinent to explore the many legends and folktales, myths and superstitions that reflect this past closeness, highlight our desire to explain nature's wonders and mysteries, and underline the necessity to preserve for future generations all creatures great and small.Gathered together in this fascinating book are the lore and legends of the animal world, alongside the realities of nature. Yet whatever their natural attributes, in folklore animals can do almost anything. They can be our friends and foes - and of course they can talk to each other. They can be evil witches and devils in disguise, they can bring good luck and bad. And in real life they can be our dearest companions, to the point of sheer worship.An amazing collection of fanciful superstitions, intriguing tales and amusing anecdotes, which any animal lover will truly relish.

Reality, Magic, and Other Lies: Fairy-Tale Film Truths explores connections and discontinuities between lies and truths in fairy-tale films to directly address the current politics of fairy tale and reality. Since the Enlightenment, notions of magic and wonder have been relegated to the realm of the fanciful, with science and reality understood as objective and true. But the skepticism associated with postmodern thought and critiques from diverse perspectives - including but not limited to anti-racist, decolonial, disability, and feminist theorizing - renders this binary distinction questionable. Further, the precise content of magic and science has shifted through history and across location. Pauline Greenhill offers the idea that fairy tales, particularly through the medium of film, often address those distinctions by making magic real and reality magical. Reality, Magic, and Other Lies consists of an introduction, two sections, and a conclusion, with the first section, "Studio, Director, and Writer Oeuvres", addressing how fairy-tale films engage with and challenge scientific or factual approaches to truth and reality, drawing on films from the stop-motion animation company LAIKA, the independent filmmaker Tarsem, and the storyteller and writer Fred Pellerin. The second section, "Themes and Issues from Three Fairy Tales", shows fairy-tale film magic exploring real-life issues and experiences using the stories of "Hansel and Gretel", "The Juniper Tree\2, and "Cinderella". The concluding section, "Moving Forward?" suggests that the key to facing the reality of contemporary issues is to invest in fairy tales as a guide, rather than a means of escape, by gathering your community and never forgetting to believe. Reality, Magic, and Other Lies-which will be of interest to film and fairy-tale scholars and students-considers the ways in which fairy tales in their mediated forms deconstruct the world and offer alternative views for peaceful, appropriate, just, and intersectionally multifaceted encounters with humans, non-human animals, and the rest of the environment.

Divining with Achi and Tara is a book on Tibetan methods of prognostics with dice and prayer beads (mala). Jan-Ulrich Sobisch offers a thorough discussion of Chinese, Indian, Turkic, and Tibetan traditions of divination, its techniques, rituals, tools, and poetic language. Interviews with Tibetan masters of divination introduce the main part with a translation of a dice divination manual of the deity Achi that is still part of a living tradition. Solvej Nielsen contributes further interviews, a mala divination of Tara and its oral tradition, and very useful glossaries of the terminology of Tibetan divination and fortune telling. Appendices provide lists of deities and spirits and of numerous identified ritual remedies and supports that are an essential element of a still vibrant Tibetan culture.