Children have their own games, stories, riddles, and so forth. This book gives students and general readers an introduction to children's folklore. Included are chapters on the definition and classification of children's folklore, the presence of children's folklore in literature and popular culture, and the scholarly interpretation of children's folklore. The volume also includes a wide range of examples and texts demonstrating the variety of children's folklore around the world.

Children have always had their own games, stories, riddles, jokes, and so forth. Many times, children's folklore differs significantly from the folklore of the adult world, as it reflects the particular concerns and experiences of childhood. In the late 19th century, children's folklore began receiving growing amounts of scholarly attention, and it is now one of the most popular topics among folklorists, general readers, and students. This book is a convenient and authoritative introduction to children's folklore for nonspecialists.

The volume begins with a discussion of how children's folklore is defined, and how various types of children's folklore are classified. This is followed by a generous selection of examples and texts illustrating the variety of children's folklore from around the world. The book then looks at how scholars have responded to children's folklore since the 19th century, and how children's folklore has become prominent in popular culture. A glossary and bibliography round out the volume.

In this surprising new look at how clothing, style, and commerce came together to change American culture, Jennifer Le Zotte examines how secondhand goods sold at thrift stores, flea markets, and garage sales came to be both profitable and culturally influential. Initially, selling used goods in the United States was seen as a questionable enterprise focused largely on the poor. But as the twentieth century progressed, multimillion-dollar businesses like Goodwill Industries developed, catering not only to the needy but increasingly to well-off customers looking to make a statement. Le Zotte traces the origins and meanings of ""secondhand style"" and explores how buying pre-owned goods went from a signifier of poverty to a declaration of rebellion. Considering buyers and sellers from across the political and economic spectrum, Le Zotte shows how conservative and progressive social activists--from religious and business leaders to anti-Vietnam protesters and drag queens--shrewdly used the exchange of secondhand goods for economic and political ends. At the same time, artists and performers, from Marcel Duchamp and Fanny Brice to Janis Joplin and Kurt Cobain, all helped make secondhand style a visual marker for youth in revolt.

The Globalization of Rural Plays in the Twenty-First Century excavates the neglected ideological substratum of peasant folk plays. By focusing on northeastern Romania and southwest Ukraine-two of the most ruralized regions in Europe-this work reveals the complex landscape of peasant plays and the essential role they perform in shaping local culture, economy, and social life. The rapid demise of these practices and the creation of preservation programs is analyzed in the context of the corrosive effects of global capitalism and the processes of globalization, urbanization, mass-mediatization, and heritagization. Just like peasants in search of better resources, rural plays "migrate" from their villages of origin into the urban, modern, and more dynamic world, where they become more visible and are both appreciated and exploited as forms of transnational, intangible cultural heritage.

Once in Old Hawaii, in the days when anything was possible, supernatural kupua roamed the islands, challenging kings and chiefs, tricking men, women, and boys. The Hawaiian people would tell and retell tales of kupua exploits, and of the men who challenged them. Some of the tall tales included in this volume are of shape-shifters like Shark Man of Ewa, who could change from man to shark, from shark to rat, from rat to a bunch of bananas. Others are of kupua with extraordinary powers like Kana, who could stretch himself as tall as a palm tree, as slender as a bamboo, as thin as a morning glory vine, as fine as a spider web. And there are men with rare and special weapons, such as Ka-ui-lani, whose talking spear could pick the winner of a cock fight before the birds were even in the ring. As in all tales told by word of mouth, change and exaggeration crept in, and perhaps this is how the kupua tale developed - through exaggeration. That they have survived, and continue to entertain, in present-day written form, is an indication of their universal appeal.

This unique ethnographic investigation examines the role that fashion plays in the production of the contemporary Indian luxury aesthetic. Tracking luxury Indian fashion from its production in village craft workshops via upmarket design studios to fashion soirees, Kuldova investigates the Indian luxury fashion market's dependence on the production of thousands of artisans all over India, revealing a complex system of hierarchies and exploitation. In recent years, contemporary Indian design has dismissed the influence of the West and has focused on the opulent heritage luxury of the maharajas, Gulf monarchies and the Mughal Empire. Luxury Indian Fashion argues that the desire for a luxury aesthetic has become a significant force in the attempt to define contemporary Indian society. From the cultivation of erotic capital in businesswomen's dress to a discussion of masculinity and muscular neo-royals to staged designer funerals, Luxury Indian Fashion analyzes the production, consumption and aesthetics of luxury and power in India. Luxury Indian Fashion is essential reading for students of fashion history and theory, anthropology and visual culture.

In the last fifty years, folklorists have amassed an extraordinary corpus of contemporary legends including "the Choking Doberman," "the Eaten Ticket," and "the Vanishing Hitchhiker." But what about the urban legends of the past? These legends and tales have rarely been collected, and when they occasionally appear, they do so as ancestors or precursors of the urban legends of today, rather than as stories in their own right. In The Nail in the Skull and Other Victorian Urban Legends, Simon Young fills this gap for British folklore (and for the wider English-speaking world) of the 1800s. Young introduces seventy Victorian urban legends ranging from "Beetle Eyes" to the "Shoplifter's Dilemma" and from "Hands in the Muff" to "the Suicide Club." While a handful of these stories are already known, the vast majority have never been identified, and they have certainly never received scholarly treatment. Young begins the volume with a lengthy introduction assessing nineteenth-century media, emphasizing the importance of the written word to the perpetuation and preservation of these myths. He draws on numerous nineteenth-century books, periodicals, and ephemera, including digitized newspaper archives-particularly the British Newspaper Archive, an exciting new hunting ground for folklorists. The Nail in the Skull and Other Victorian Urban Legends will appeal to an academic audience as well as to anyone who is interested in urban legends.

Universally recognisable, the umbrella and its older, prettier sister the parasol have made their mark. Politics, religion, war and fashion have all been influenced by this modest contraption. With a beautiful collection of images, The Umbrella Unfurled follows its hero to Ancient Egypt, where at first it was for the Pharaoh's use only. References and physical representations of it are found throughout the Old World, often bearing great symbolic and ceremonial weight. Yet despite its more practical reputation in the West, it still holds cultural significance. As the ultimate accoutrement to the fashionable Edwardian lady; as part of the rank-and-file uniform of the City gentleman; it even made it onto the battlefield, though against the better judgement of the Duke of Wellington. And it has been wielded with more sinister intent as the weapon of choice by the KGB in seeking to dispatch dissidents abroad. Decorative, useful, symbolic and even deadly, the umbrella has a story older and more elaborate that one might think, all related in a highly entertaining gift book that could only have been written by an Englishman.

This book explores the intersection of folklore and new media storytelling in feminist adaptations of traditional fairy tales. Focusing on the Germanic folktale, the author investigates how retelling and reinterpreting fairy tales in online fan fiction both criticizes traditional narratives and reinforces the continued importance of fairy tales, while also mirroring contemporary concerns and changes in German-speaking society. Fan versions of the examined folktales are repurposed to serve new functions within the communities in which they are told. Within the community investigated in this book, the stories open an online space where women can reclaim and reconsider the role canonical fairy tales play in their lives. Introducing fandom and new media studies to the realm of oral storytelling and folklore produces a new way of understanding the importance of communal folklore even in an age of mass culture. The adaptations traced throughout this book show the fascinating longevity and flexibility of the folktale and its power to reimagine the Germanic past into the future.