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First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
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The biblical stories of Lot’s daughters, Tamar, Ruth and Bathsheba, share much in common – singular women who are left to rely upon their own wits to achieve some measure of victory over the men around them. Scholarly interpretation of these women often reduces them to mere stock characters who inform civic notions about Israel, the perennial underdog who, like these women, achieves against great odds. Or, they reflect the trickery and moral ambiguity inherent in their line as ancestresses of the House of David. However, when read for their gender information (and not for what they can tell readers about Israel), one finds women who employ strategies of deception and trickery, motivated ...
This rich, interdisciplinary collection of articles offers fascinating new insights into the history and culture of Sephardic Jewry both in pre-Expulsion Iberia and throughout the far-flung diaspora.
Treating Old Testament stories as the product of an oral traditional world, A Prelude to Biblical Folklore sets biblical narrative in a broad cross-cultural context and reveals much about the richness and complexity of the ancient Israelite civilization that produced it. Using a unique combination of biblical scholarship and folklore methodology, Susan Niditch tracks stories of biblical characters who become heroes against the odds, either through trickery or through native wisdom, physical prowess, and the help of human or divine agents. In this volume, originally published as Underdogs and Tricksters, Niditch examines three cross-sections of the Old Testament in detail: stories in Genesis ...
'. . . not a large book, but that makes all the more admirable the way the more admirable the way the author succeeds in doing justice to so many of the most important subjects in folkloristics. This book is a key work, and should be made compulsory reading in every university in which folkloristics is studied.'-Jon Hnefill Aoalsteinsson, Asian Folklore Studies
International folkloristics is a worldwide discipline in which scholars study various forms of folklore ranging from myth, folktale, and legend to custom and belief. Twenty classic essays, beginning with a piece by Jacob Grimm, reveal the evolving theoretical underpinnings of folkloristics from its nineteenth century origins to its academic coming-of-age in the twentieth century. Each piece is prefaced by extensive editorial introductions placing them in a historical and intellectual context. The twenty essays presented here, including several never published previously in English, will be required reading for any serious student of folklore.
The apostle Paul--antifeminist conformist, or social radical? Combining New Testament studies with folkloristic methods to search for the true identity of Paul, the author sheds new light on the apocryphal Acts of Paul and the Pastoral Epistles of the canonical New Testament. With this book, the legends surrounding the apostle have been rescued from near oblivion and properly placed in the Pauline tradition. Formulated in the days of early Christianity and handed down through the centuries, they cast new light on Paul's views about the ordination of women, the forms of Christian community, and the meaning of the gospel for politics, society, and sexuality.
This book is the first comparative study of English, German, French, Russian and Hungarian anti-proverbs based on well-known proverbs. Proverbs are by no means fossilized texts but are adaptable to different times and changed values. While anti-proverbs can be considered as variants of older proverbs, they can also become new proverbs reflecting a more modern worldview. Anti-proverbs are therefore a lingo-cultural phenomenon that deserves the attention of cultural and literary historians, folklorists, linguists, and general readers interested in language and wordplay.
"Diane Sharon uses the tools of structuralist literary criticism to uncover social and theological patterns in the literature of the Hebrew Bible. After providing a brief framework for understanding the approach used in her study, she demonstrates that the social activity of eating and drinking, when accompanied by other literary motifs, is part of a pattern portending the establishment or condemnation of a cultural entity. This pattern she refers to as the Pattern of Destiny." "In addition to defining the "destiny pattern," Sharon shows that the "direction" of the eating and/or drinking event provides clues regarding the nature of the destiny portended: whether the event will turn out to the positive or negative for the individual or cultural entity is signaled by clues within the eating/drinking event, sometimes in opposition to the surface structure of the text in which these clues are embedded." --Book Jacket.