Ebook: Analytic Essays in Folklore

First edition, Second printing 1979.

The following essays appeared originally in diverse journals and reflect my principal research interests, which, generally speaking, focus upon the analysis of folklore. For too many years, the discipline of folklore has overemphasized collecting and classifying its materials to the point where questions of analysis have inevitably been postponed.

The reader may disagree with the types of analysis I use, namely, structural analysis as a means of rigorously describing the nature of folkloristic data, and psychoanalytic insights I have attempted to apply to folklore so as to bring unconscious content into consciousness. I am well aware that neither structural analysis nor psychoanalysis are widely accepted by American folklorists. But even if the reader does not share my theoretical biases, I would hope that he would at least admit that the field of folklore is in dire need of new analytic methods. The relatively few considerations of folklore theory which exist in the literature prove upon examination to be little more than rehashes of the nineteenth century concern with historical reconstruction, typically by using a form of the comparative method.