Building on his work in Traditional Oral Epic and Immanent Art, the author aims to dissolve the perceived barrier between oral and written, creating a theory from oral-formulaic theory and the ethnography of speaking and ethnopoetics. He argues that a work's word-power derives from its performance and its implied traditional context.

Albert Bates Lord here offers an unparalleled overview of the nature of oral-traditional epic songs and the practices of the singers who composed them. Shaped by the conviction that theory should be based on what singers actually do, and have done in times past, the essays collected here span half a century of Lord's research on the oral tradition from Homer to the twentieth century. Drawing on his extensive fieldwork in living oral traditions and on the theoretical writings of Milman Parry, Lord concentrates on the singers and their art as manifested in texts of performance. In thirteen essays, some previously unpublished and all of them revised for book publication, he explores questions of composition, transmittal, and interpretation and raises important comparative issues. Individual chapters discuss aspects of the Homeric poems, South Slavic oral-traditional epics, the songs of Avdo Metedovic, Beowulf and Anglo-Saxon poetry, the medieval Greek Digenis Akritas and other medieval epics, central Asiatic and Balkan epics, the Finnish Kalevala, and the Bulgarian oral epic. The work of one of the most respected scholars of his generation, Epic Singers and Oral Tradition will be an invaluable resource for scholars and students of myth and folklore, classicists, medievalists, Slavists, comparatists, literary theorists, and anthropologists.

Discusses the oral tradition as a theory of literary composition and its applications to Homeric and medieval epic.

P'ansori, the traditional oral narrative of Korea, is sung by a highly trained soloist to the accompaniment of complex drumming. In the first book-length treatment in English of this art form, Pihl traces its history from roots in shamanism and folktales through its 19th-century heyday and discusses its evolution in the 20th century.

Edited by Mary Louise Lord after the author's death, The Singer Resumes the Tale focuses on the performance of stories and poems within settings that range from ancient Greek palaces to Latvian villages. Lord expounds and develops his approach to oral literature in this book, responds systematically for the first time to criticisms of oral theory, and extends his methods to the analysis of lyric poems. He also considers the implications of the transitional text - a work made up of both oral and literary components. Elements of the oral tradition - the practice of storytelling in prose or verse, the art of composing and transmitting songs, the content of these texts, the kinds of songs composed, and the poetics of oral literature - are discussed in the light of several traditions, beginning in the ancient world, through the Middle Ages, to the present. Throughout, the central figure is always the singer. Homer, the Beowulf poet, women who perform lyric songs, tellers of folktales, singers of such ballads as "Barbara Allen", bards of the Balkans: all play prominent roles in Lord's book, as they have played central roles in the creation of this fundamental literature.

From its ancient incarnation as a song to recent translations in modern languages, Homeric epic remains an abiding source of inspiration for both scholars and artists that transcends temporal and linguistic boundaries. The Cambridge Guide to Homer examines the influence and meaning of Homeric poetry from its earliest form as ancient Greek song to its current status in world literature, presenting the information in a synthetic manner that allows the reader to gain an understanding of the different strands of Homeric studies. The volume is structured around three main themes: Homeric Song and Text; the Homeric World, and Homer in the World. Each section starts with a series of 'macropedia' essays arranged thematically that are accompanied by shorter complementary 'micropedia' articles. The Cambridge Guide to Homer thus traces the many routes taken by Homeric epic in the ancient world and its continuing relevance in different periods and cultures.

From the acclaimed biographer of Jane Jacobs and Srinivasa Ramanujan comes the first full life and work of arguably the most influential classical scholar of the twentieth century, who overturned long-entrenched notions of ancient epic poetry and enlarged the very idea of literature. In this literary detective story, Robert Kanigel gives us a long overdue portrait of an Oakland druggist's son who became known as the "Darwin of Homeric studies." So thoroughly did Milman Parry change our thinking about the origins of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey that scholars today refer to a "before" Parry and an "after." Kanigel describes the "before," when centuries of readers, all the way up until Parry's trailblazing work in the 1930's, assumed that the Homeric epics were "written" texts, the way we think of most literature; and the "after" that we now live in, where we take it for granted that they are the result of a long and winding oral tradition. Parry made it his life's work to develop and prove this revolutionary theory, and Kanigel brilliantly tells his remarkable story--cut short by Parry's mysterious death by gunshot wound at the age of thirty-three. From UC Berkeley to the Sorbonne to Harvard to Yugoslavia--where he traveled to prove his idea definitively by studying its traditional singers of heroic poetry--we follow Parry on his idiosyncratic journey, observing just how his early notions blossomed into a full-fledged theory. Kanigel gives us an intimate portrait of Parry's marriage to Marian Thanhouser and their struggles as young parents in Paris, and explores the mystery surrounding Parry's tragic death at the Palms Hotel in Los Angeles. Tracing Parry's legacy to the modern day, Kanigel explores how what began as a way to understand the Homeric epics became the new field of "oral theory," which today illuminates everything from Beowulf to jazz improvisation, from the Old Testament to hip-hop.