New Books in Folklore

By: Marshall Poe
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  • Summary

  • Interviews with Scholars of Folklore about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore
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Episodes
  • Audun Kjus et al., "Adventures in the Play-Ritual Continuum" (Utah State UP, 2024)

    Audun Kjus et al., "Adventures in the Play-Ritual Continuum" (Utah State UP, 2024)
    Feb 21 2025
    Audun Kjus joins Jana Byars to talk about Adventures in the Play-Ritual Continuum (Utah State Press, 2025), eds. Audun Kjus, Jakob Löfgren, Cliona O’Carroll, Simon Poole & Ida Tolgensbakk. Utah State Press, 2025). The junctions between play and ritual are many and complex. Play is for fun and joy, but it also demands a total commitment and serious respect for rules. Rituals involve nearly endless varieties of social arrangements and can truly transform people, but they also include improvisation, testing, and pretending. Adventures in the Play-Ritual Continuum explores the connectivity between the playful and the ritualized through a fresh theoretical perspective, highlighting the creative messiness and the cultural paradoxes such intersections allow. The chapters span topics such as hen parties, marriage proposals, ash scatterings, extreme sports races, football fans, computer game festivals, celebrations of fandom, migration heritages, and antiracist protests. While the case studies are selected to show a range of diversity with various mergings of play, game, ritual, ceremony, rite, and ritualizing, the introductory and concluding discussions offer sharpened perspectives on common aspects. Following these excursions through the play-ritual continuum will be enjoyable for readers interested in how people make sense of their own existence and profitable for scholars in folklore, anthropology, religion, pedagogy, cultural studies, and social sciences and humanities more generally. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore
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    51 mins
  • Ann Schmiesing, "The Brothers Grimm: A Biography" (Yale UP, 2024)

    Ann Schmiesing, "The Brothers Grimm: A Biography" (Yale UP, 2024)
    Feb 4 2025
    Ann Schmiesing, Ph.D. is Professor of German and Scandinavian Studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder, with research interests spanning 18th and 19th-century German and Norwegian literature and culture. In our interview we discuss her new book, The Brothers Grimm: A Biography (Yale UP, 2024), their first biography in over half a century. We talk about what led her to Germanic studies and fairy tales in particular. We discuss the revelations in her book dealing with their lives and work, their antisemitism as reflected in their correspondence and the stories they published and its long-ranging consequences. We talk about some of her favorite fairy tales and what makes them special. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore
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    52 mins
  • Sara Burdorff, "Maternity, Monstrosity, and Heroic (Im)mortality from Homer to Shakespeare" (Amsterdam UP, 2025)

    Sara Burdorff, "Maternity, Monstrosity, and Heroic (Im)mortality from Homer to Shakespeare" (Amsterdam UP, 2025)
    Feb 2 2025
    Sara Burdorff joins Jana Byars to talk about her new book, Maternity, Monstrosity and Heroic (Im)mortality from Homer to Shakespeare (Amsterdam University Press, 2025). This work uses an adaptation of monster theory to rethink the foundations of epic-heroic immortality. Rather than focusing on a specific monster or monsters, the author identifies the "belly-monstrous" as a crucial point of intersection between mothers and warriors in traditional narratives of the Trojan War. Identifying the gestating/digesting belly as the center of the Iliadic world, this groundbreaking approach disrupts androcentric readings of the Iliadic warrior and his ethos, emphasizing the crucial role of female suffering in the generation and preservation of immortal legacy. The author reconsiders ancient Greek depictions of the Trojan War and its aftermath, including Homeric epic and the tragedies of Aeschylus and Euripides, and illuminates the cohesive patterning of Shakespeare's "mother-warrior" plays, which place inherited Iliadic-belly-monstrous motifs in conversation with cultural anxieties of late Elizabethan England. With meticulous scholarship and captivating analysis, Maternity, Monstrosity, and Heroic (Im)mortality from Homer to Shakespeare redefines the relationship between mothers and warriors in the Iliadic-heroic ideal, paving the way for new interpretations of war, grief, and immortal glory in a broad range of literary and cultural contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore
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    38 mins

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