Odd Player

To say that the late Alan Dundes (1934–2005) was a monument in folklore studies is to state the obvious. Almost more than any other figure in the discipline, Dundes helped to define the academic trends of research and analysis for two generations of American folklorists. He was a prolific writer, often publishing in hard-to-obtain journals, with material frequently being out of print soon after publication. Although Dundes wrote several books, his primary means for disseminating his ideas was through the essay or article. Therefore, it is a suitable tribute to such an important scholar that his colleague Simon J. Bronner should have taken up the task of retrieving and assembling a goodly body of Dundes’s work, and publishing it in this collection of essays. In The Meaning of Folklore, Bronner has brought together twenty articles assembled under two rubrics, “Structure and Analysis” and “Worldview and Identity.” These articles cover the whole of the forty-year period of Dundes’s research and thus constitute a general overview of and introduction to his thinking. Suitably, Bronner has placed first the early article “Folklore as a Mirror of Culture” (1969), which stresses Dundes’s argument about the relationship between folklore and culture and how his view differs from that of the great American anthropologist Franz Boas and his school. The ensuing wide range of articles cover subjects such as structuralism as an analytical method, psychological analyses—especially relating to subliminal sexual innuendo, analyses of discreet folklore subjects both verbal and behavioural, comparative analyses of non-western (European) materials, and a great deal more. This book is a rich treasury that will repay re-reading several times.

The preface is in itself an essay outlining Dundes’s work and its importance, which also situates the editor in relation Dundes’s thought. The preface concludes with an extensive bibliography. This is followed by a thirty-five-page introduction detailing the various trends and aspects of Dundes’s ideas about folklore, his research, his methodology, and his analyses of folklore. Each of the twenty essays is preceded by an extensive introduction by Bronner in which he discusses the background to the issues or subjects of the particular essay. There is an extensive index and a very full bibliography. The latter is especially important because it provides in one place a nearly complete listing of Dundes’s writing arranged chronologically. This arrangement means that it is easy to trace the development of Dundes’s research interests over four decades.

There are only three quibbles I would make about this book. First, the bibliography (called “References”) is located after the Introduction rather than at the end of the book. This arrangement made it hard to check references. Second, each essay does not have a statement in its editorial introduction about the date and place of publication. As the bibliography was arranged chronologically and not alphabetically by title, it was difficult to compare different articles on a similar theme or topic. Third, it would have been useful if the introduction had contained a brief biography of Dundes. A man is, after all, more than just his works.

This book is commended to all folklorists as a resource on the life work of one of the leading American folklorists of the twentieth century. It is probably too dense and too technical, however, for the general reader and the undergraduate student.