First published in 1989. The ballad or romance, as it is commonly called, has played a vital role over the centuries in Hispanic culture as an orally transmitted narrative song. It is characteristically the product of people who have had to look to themselves for entertainment. From the end of the fifteenth to the early seventeenth century, the romancero (balladry) enjoyed a great vogue among learned poets and their audiences, especially in the Spanish and Portuguese courts. The authors’ intent in this book is to survey and to assess the state of the romancero, not only in Spain and Portugal, but also in peripheral areas whereit has migrated and taken root.

First published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

"Spanish Traditional Ballads from Aragon is a collection of 308 oral traditional ballads representing fifty-nine different text-types that author Michele S. de Cruz-Saenz collected on trips to 280 Aragonese towns and villages. In the course of her study, she interviewed 143 informants from seventy-five towns. They were men and women, ranging from illiterate to professional, whose ages were from ten to more than one hundred years. It was her intention to rescue this aspect of Spanish folklore, which is quickly disappearing in the wake of agricultural mechanization and modern technology. All of the informants shared her desire, and lent their enthusiastic collaboration in the preservation of Aragonese cultural identity."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

First published in 1989. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Mexican Ballads, Chicano Poems combines literary theory with the personal engagement of a prominent Chicano scholar. Recalling his experiences as a student in Texas, José Limón examines the politically motivated Chicano poetry of the 60s and 70s. He bases his analyses on Harold Bloom's theories of literary influence but takes Bloom into the socio-political realm. Limón shows how Chicano poetry is nourished by the oral tradition of the Mexican corrido, or master ballad, which was a vital part of artistic and political life along the Mexican-U.S. border from 1890 to 1930. Limón's use of Bloom, as well as of Marxist critics Raymond Williams and Fredric Jameson, brings Chicano literature into the arena of contemporary literary theory. By focusing on an important but little-studied poetic tradition, his book challenges our ideas of the American canon and extends the reach of Hispanists and folklorists as well.

Published in honour of one of the most renowned scholars in the field of Late Medieval Literature in Spain, this book aims to bring together 19 original contributions from some of the leading international academics. It is suitable for those studying the vein of Spanish literature.

Tales from the Sephardic Dispersion begins the most important collection of Jewish folktales ever published. It is the first volume in Folktales of the Jews, the five-volume series to be released over the next several years, in the tradition of Louis Ginzberg's classic, Legends of the Jews. The 71 tales here and the others in this series have been selected from the Israel Folktale Archives, Named in Honor of Dov Noy, The University of Haifa (IFA), a treasure house of Jewish lore that has remained largely unavailable to the entire world until now. Since the creation of the State of Israel, the IFA has collected more than 20,000 tales from newly arrived immigrants, long-lost stories shared by their families from around the world. The tales come from the major ethno-linguistic communities of the Jewish world and are representative of a wide variety of subjects and motifs, especially rich in Jewish content and context. Each of the tales is accompanied by in-depth commentary that explains the tale's cultural, historical, and literary background and its similarity to other tales in the IFA collection, and extensive scholarly notes. There is also an introduction that describes the Sephardic culture and its folk narrative tradition, a world map of the areas covered, illustrations, biographies of the collectors and narrators, tale type and motif indexes, a subject index, and a comprehensive bibliography. Until the establishment of the IFA, we had had only limited access to the wide range of Jewish folk narratives. Even in Israel, the gathering place of the most wide-ranging cross-section of world Jewry, these folktales have remained largely unknown. Many of the communities no longer exist as cohesive societies in their representative lands; the Holocaust, migration, and changes in living styles have made the continuation of these tales impossible. This volume and the others to come will be monuments to a rich but vanishing oral tradition.