Dan Ben-Amos (author), Henry Glassie, and Elliott Oring, eds., Folklore Concepts : Histories and Critiques

Toward a Definition of Folklore in Context" in 1971, Dan Ben-Amos has been one of the intellectual leaders of international folkloristics.This collection, edited by Henry Glassie and Elliott Oring-two other masters of the discipline-brings together twelve articles representing the theoretical views, methodological principles, critical statements, and scholarly creeds of Ben-Amos.The first articles in the book were written in the 1960s, while the last, "A Definition of Folklore: A Personal Narrative," appeared in 2014.Although the sequence of articles does not follow the chronological order of writing, the outcome is a coherent and consolidated work, expressing systematic thinking that ties the volume together.As the author himself notes in the final passage, the concept of folklore defined by him in his early career sustained him and continued to be the fundamental premise of his studies (215).Thematically the book mainly reflects trans-Atlantic folkloristics: American, European, and Israeli scholarship and their mutual relations, on top of which the temporal scope of the book is vast.Starting from references to the folklore of ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Classical Greece, it ranges to the Hellenistic author Marcus Terentius Varro and extends to sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century Europeans, such as the cosmographer Sebastian Muenster, the Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus, and the philosopher Giambattista Vico