This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1988.

An analysis of Texan oral narratives that focuses on the significance of their social context. Although the tales are all from Texas, they are considered representative of oral storytelling traditions in their relationships between story, performance and event.

In this study, Nancy Bradbury presents a spectrum of medieval English romances that extends from the fragmentary remains of a predominantly oral tradition to a writerly work that proclaims its own place in the European tradition of canonical poetry. By focusing on works composed at the interface of oral and literary tradition, Bradbury tracks the movement of folkloric patterns from the shared culture of oral storytelling to the realm of elite literature.

This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2013. The relationship between text (aural, oral and visual) and human (author and audience) that is inherent in the act of storytelling reflects the fact that any story is a uniquely interactive and interdependent phenomenon. This collection presents the reader with a truly interdisciplinary forum in which the art of storytelling is considered from the purview of rigorous academic inquiry. To entirely ignore the aesthetics of storytelling, however, would be to devalue the profound and unspeakable connection to stories of all kinds that is a timeless aspect of the human experience. The chapters within preserve the artistic grandeur of storytelling while strengthening and broadening the validity of the story as an area worth of rigorous academic pursuit. The scope of inquiry represented by the chapters within demonstrates the fact that questions of architecture, motive, method and rhetoric have the power to enhance our experience of storytelling as an expression of the human spirit.