'Irish Customs and Beliefs' is a book of stories and beliefs of all kinds of things to do with old Ireland: highwaymen and travelling people, the Irish whiteboys, lost and hidden treasures. Beliefs associated with birds, insects, animals, plants, bushes, trees and stones, dwarfs and fabulous water monsters, ghosts, witches, castles and drowned cities.

Oral tales establish relationships between storytellers and their listeners. Yet most printed collections of folktales contain only stories, stripped of the human contexts in which they are told. If storytellers are mentioned at all, they are rarely consulted about what meanings they see in their tales. In this innovative book, Indian-American anthropologist Kirin Narayan reproduces twenty-one folktales narrated in a mountain dialect by a middle-aged Indian village woman, Urmila Devi Sood, or "Urmilaji." The tales are set within the larger story of Kirin Narayan's research in the Himalayan foothill region of Kangra, and of her growing friendship with Urmilaji Sood. In turn, Urmilaji Sood supplements her tales with interpretations of the wisdom that she discerns in their plots. At a moment when the mass-media is flooding through rural India, Urmilaji Sood asserts the value of her tales which have been told and retold across generations. As she says, "Television can't teach you these things."
These tales serve as both moral instruction and as beguiling entertainment. The first set of tales, focussing on women's domestic rituals, lays out guidelines for female devotion and virtue. Here are tales of a pious washerwoman who brings the dead to life, a female weevil observing fasts for a better rebirth, a barren woman who adopts a frog and lights ritual oil lamps, and a queen who remains with her husband through twelve arduous years of affliction. The women performing these rituals and listening to the accompanying stories are thought to bring good fortune to their marriages, and long life to their relatives. The second set of tales, associated with passing the time around the fire through long winter nights, are magical adventure tales. Urmilaji Sood tells of a matchmaker who marries a princess off to a lion, God splitting a boy claimed by two families into two selves, a prince's journey to the land of the demons, and a girl transformed into a bird by her stepmother.
In an increasingly interconnected world, anthropologists' authority to depict and theorize about distant people's lives is under fire. Kirin Narayan seeks solutions to this crisis in anthropology by locating the exchange of knowledge in a respectful, affectionate collaboration. Through the medium of oral narratives, Urmilaji Sood describes her own life and lives around her, and through the medium of ethnography Kirin Narayan shows how broader conclusions emerge from specific, spirited interactions. Set evocatively amid the changing seasons in a Himalayan foothill village, this pathbreaking book draws a moving portrait of an accomplished woman storyteller. Mondays on the Dark Night of the Moon offers a window into the joys and sorrows of women's changing lives in rural India, and reveals the significance of oral storytelling in nurturing human ties.

A helpful and easy-to-use guide that takes you from the White House to a backyard barbecue in Texas style.

Examining all the rites of passage in our lives from birth to funerals, Texas Manners takes Emily Post and adds a special Texas twist.

Invitations and thank-you notes, table manners, job interviews, cotillions, quinceaneras, college preparation, entertaining tips, planning a wedding; these are just a few of the subjects that are explained and described in this handy and instructive resource.

The detailed table of contents and index make this a user-friendly guide to all your entertainment and etiquette questions.

Pregnant Fictions explores the complex role of pregnancy in early modern tale-telling and considers how stories of childbirth were used to rethink gendered "truths" at a key moment in the history of ideas. How male medical authorities and female literary authors struggled to describe the inner workings of the unseen--and competed to shape public understanding of it--is the focus of this engaging work by Holly Tucker. In illuminating the gender politics underlying dramatic changes in reproductive theory and practice, Tucker shows just how tenuous the boundaries of scientific "fact" and marvelous fictions were in early modern France. On the literary front, Tucker argues, women used the fairy tale to rethink the biology of childbirth and the sociopolitical uses to which it had been put. She shows that in references to midwives, infertility, sex selection, and embryological theories, fairy-tale writers experimented with alternative ways of understanding pregnancy. In so doing they suggested new ways in which to envision women, knowledge, and power in both the public and the private spheres.

William Blake and the Myths of Britain is the first full-length study of Blake's use of British mythology and history. From Atlantis to the Deists of the Napoleonic Wars, this book addresses why the eighteenth century saw a revival of interest in the legends of the British Isles and how Blake applied these in his extraordinary prophetic histories of the giant Albion, revitalising myths of the Druids and Joseph of Arimathea bringing Christ to Albion.

"Everything about Texas makes for folklore: oil, cattle, timber, and the talent to spin a yarn. Folklore is a lively art form in this state of blue skies and white caliche. Jim Gramon has brought forth this wonderful collection of tall tales and legendary characters. I am honored to be one of his legends".
Liz Carpenter"
"For a Texan who isn't me, Jim Gramon can really write!"
Kinky Friedman
Author The Mile High Club
Jim Gramon, a native Texas storyteller, introduces you to some of his friends:
- John Henry Faulk

With such a rich and significant history, it's only natural that some of the best stories from the Sunshine State have been forgotten over time. Thankfully, master storyteller and St. Augustine resident Bob Patterson offers this collection of the strangest, most fascinating stories and legends in Florida's history from coast to coast, swamp to swamp. Enjoy the saga of William Ellis, a north Florida nature whisperer who escaped from his nursing home with the help of his varmint friends; step into the murk and mystery of the vanishing tribes of the Everglades; and could there really be gator-hungry sharks lurking in the St. Johns River? These stories and so many more await when you explore the "Forgotten Tales of Florida."

The essays in this volume examine elements of the fantastic in a variety of media. From the fiction of Toni Morrison, Stephen King, and Chinua Achebe, to the rock songs of David Bowie, the fantastic is seen as adaptable to any art form. In an accessible manner, the contributors present fresh approaches to examining the elements of the fantastic in literature, film, music, and popular culture. The collection features an essay by Ursula K. Le Guin.

Classical Presences
Series Editors: Lorna Hardwick, Professor of Classical Studies, Open University, and James I. Porter, Professor of Greek, Latin, and Comparative Literature, University of Michigan
The texts, ideas, images, and material culture of ancient Greece and Rome have always been crucial to attempts to appropriate the past in order to authenticate the present. They underlie the mapping of change and the assertion and challenging of values and identities, old and new. Classical Presences brings the latest scholarship to bear on the contexts, theory, and practice of such use, and abuse, of the classical past.
Laughing with Medusa explores a series of inter-linking questions, including: Does history's self-positioning as the successor of myth result in the exclusion of alternative narratives of the past? How does feminism exclude itself from certain historical discourses? Why has psychoanalysis placed myth at the center of its explorations of the modern subject? Why are the Muses feminine? Do the categories of myth and politics intersect or are they mutually exclusive? Does feminism's recourse to myth offer a script of resistance or commit it to an ineffective utopianism? Covering a wide range of subject areas including poetry, philosophy, science, history, and psychoanalysis as well as classics, this book engages with these questions from a truly interdisciplinary perspective. It includes a specially commissioned work of fiction, "Iphigeneia's Wedding," by the poet Elizabeth Cook.

A collection of stories exploring dreamtime myths through ancient images, such as the Rainbow Snake, the discovery of fire, and the first man and woman. Divided into three sections, The Great Father, Totemic Ancestors and Creation Myths, it seeks to provide an insight into Aboriginal culture.

Is Kangaroo an Aboriginal word? What does brolga mean? Many of the words Australians use every day have their origins in some of the hundreds of Aboriginal languages once spoken across the land. this book is a fascinating reference for anyone interested in knowing more about the original inhabitants of this vast continent.

An enthralling collection of traditional tales that date back to the beginning of time. Learn how Yhi the sun goddess introduced life to the world, why the emu cannot fly and how the kangaroo got its tail. Packed with myths and legends about creation, these stories retell how people and animals were made.

Renowned storyteller Docia Williams gathers a medley of some of the best haunting stories from her four previous books Spirits of San Antonio and South Texas, Phantoms of the Plains, Ghosts Along the Texas Coast, and When Darkness Falls then she adds a hundred pages of new ghostly tales from the Piney Woods of East Texas and from North Central Texas, including the Dallas area.
Once again Mrs. Williams brings to light tangible evidence and eyewitness testimony in Best Tales of Texas Ghosts to validate an illusive world without dimension, one filled with bizarre and disturbing accounts of unexplained presences.
After interviewing hundreds of people with firsthand experiences and personally witnessing eerie manifestations, she has concluded, [There are things happening all around us that can only be labeled as supernatural.]