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Newfoundlanders have long and lustily sung their folksongs, and the tradition remains strong today. Despite modern influences, the old songs persist, mixed with new songs that are composed to record the events of our time. This is the first major collection of Newfoundland folksongs compiled and edited by native Newfoundlanders. It concentrates on songs of local composition largely ignored by earlier collectors and presents a significant number of songs never before published. For most of the last decade Lehr and Best have been travelling around the island recording the voices and favourite songs of anyone, young and old, who would perform. Recordings took place in family kitchens, on stage ...
A powerful grief book - poems that are not so much elegiac as visionary. Stomata, Genevieve Lehr's second collection, asks that language shoulder loss, that it reach out centrifugally, at full metaphorical stretch, calling upon all its narrative and lyric resources to be adequate to human tragedy. These losses include immediate deaths, Alzheimer's, abuse, cancer, and - in a remarkable poem - residential schools, and they activate a potent spirituality that calls on a full range of imagistic resources. As a grief book, Stomata is remarkable for its energy and range. While it honours and remembers the lost, it is always charged with a sense of a mystic power deriving from them. In a conversati...
Contains over 500 articles Ranging over foodways and folksongs, quiltmaking and computer lore, Pecos Bill, Butch Cassidy, and Elvis sightings, more than 500 articles spotlight folk literature, music, and crafts; sports and holidays; tall tales and legendary figures; genres and forms; scholarly approaches and theories; regions and ethnic groups; performers and collectors; writers and scholars; religious beliefs and practices. The alphabetically arranged entries vary from concise definitions to detailed surveys, each accompanied by a brief, up-to-date bibliography. Special features *More than 2000 contributors *Over 500 articles spotlight folk literature, music, crafts, and more *Alphabetically arranged *Entries accompanied by up-to-date bibliographies *Edited by America's best-known folklore authority
A comprehensive collection of the pioneering work of Leonard Norman Primiano, one of the preeminent scholars in religious studies In 1995, Leonard Norman Primiano introduced the idea of “vernacular religion.” He coined this term to overcome the denigration implied in the concept of “folk religion” or “popular religion,” which was juxtaposed to “elite religion.” This two-tiered model suggested that religion existed somewhere in a pure form and that the folk version transforms it. Instead, Primiano urged scholars to adopt an inductive approach to the study of religion and to pay attention to experiential aspects of belief systems, ultimately redressing a heritage of scholarly m...
Much has been written about the songs gathered in North America in the first half of the 20th century. However, there is scant information on those individuals responsible for gathering these songs. The Ballad Collectors of North America: How Gathering Folksongs Transformed Academic Thought and American Identity fills this gap, documenting the efforts of those who transcribed and recorded North American folk songs. Both biographical and topical, this book chronicles not only the most influential of these "song catchers" but also examines the main schools of thought on the collection process, the leading proponents of those schools, and the projects that they shaped. Contributors also conside...
This compilation from one of Canada's most acclaimed writers spans four decades and six volumes. Often bittersweet and occasionally enigmatic, these poems represent Pittman's infinite talent. Targeted at a wide circle of readers, this book gives poetry back to the people, where it truly belongs.
An Unauthorized Biography of the World explores the practice of engaged oral history: the difficult, sometimes dangerous work of recovering fragments of human story that have gone missing from the official versions. Michael Riordon has thirty years' experience as a writer and broadcaster in the field. Readers will encounter a gallery of brave, passionate people who gather silenced voices and lost life stories. The canvas is broad, the stakes are high: the battles for First Nations lands in Canada; environmental justice in Chicago; genocide in Peru; homeless people organizing in Cleveland; September 11/01, and after, in New York City; gay survivors of electroshock in Britain; the struggle to preserve a people's identity in Newfoundland; peasant resistance to a huge transnational gold mine in Turkey.
“[An] almost mythical story of fractured families, wars, and homecomings” from the international bestselling author of The Fortunate Brother (Quill & Quire). With Kit’s Law, Donna Morrissey established herself as a gifted storyteller. Her chronicle of life in a remote Newfoundland outport was acclaimed by critics and embraced by readers worldwide. Downhill Chance is a captivating successor to Morrissey’s first novel. Set in a pair of isolated fishing communities in Newfoundland during and after the Second World War, this is the story of two families joined by friendship but torn apart by fear and sorrows. Prude Osmond reads her tea leaves and predicts dark days ahead. Meanwhile, an h...
Genevieve Lehr's debut poetry collection is astonishing in its stylistic range, employing the lyric, prose poem, folk song and fable, as well as several long poems, in her attempt to understand the complexities of human life. The Sorrowing House focuses on her difficulties as a single mother with three children, including a son with special needs. The poems range far and wide in search of metaphors adequate to elucidate the stark contrast between the joys and sorrows of a life constrained by harrowing limitations and challenges. In March the river rises. On its bank the thin bodies of birch reach up, herons stretching a paper-maker's wife pounding reeds in the wind. from river images for my ...