Arnold Schrier’s study, Ireland and the American Emigration, 1850–1900 (1958) set out to analyse the impact of mass emigration to America on the country of origin. Schrier collaborated with the Irish Folklore Commission to devise a questionnaire to gather data on the cultural and folkloristic reaction to emigration. While conducted in 1955, most of those interviewed were in their seventies and eighties and could provide memories and reflections on emigration and returned migration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The questionnaire is a significant source for those desiring to learn more about Ireland and America and possible Americanising influences. This chapter provides a detailed analysis of the questionnaire and the data which emerged from it. Críostóir Mac Cárthaigh notes the nuanced attitudes towards the returned migrant evident in the survey responses, beyond the stereotype of the ‘show off’ returned Yank. Mac Cárthaigh concludes that the disruptive figure of the returned Yank highlighted the gap between the opportunity and novel experiences represented by emigration and the conservatism of the society left behind.

The conclusion sums up the main arguments of the book on the formative albeit discreet role of caravan trade in the political economy of the Middle East both during and after the Ottoman period. It draws on this history to challenge recent directions in the history of the Middle East by advocating for inner perspectives on connections thanks to the crossing of endogenous documentation (in Arabic and in Ottoman) with foreign sources, more attention for legacy, resilience and slowness in a period of rapid technological and political transformation. The history of caravan supports a new way of considering the Middle East from inside. It also offers insights on the background of debates over past carbonisation and present decarbonisation.

The final published debate in which Neurath participated was with Horace Kallen, founding member of the New School in New York. This discussion with manifold cultural dimensions was a fitting swansong for Neurath, summarizing key themes of his thought and highlighting essential issues of his complex and contentious legacy. Kallen suspected Neurath’s drive for ‘Unity of Science’ as harbouring the danger of totalitarianism, but Neurath defended the pluralism of his approach while accepting Kallen’s proposed term of ‘orchestration’ instead of ‘unity’ for the sciences. Neurath felt rather neglected for his scholarly achievements at the end of his life, but these now become increasingly more relevant.

This chapter traces the development of Russian poetry from the earliest known texts to the late nineteenth century. The emphasis is on versification (syllabic, syllabo-tonic, and tonic [also called accentual] systems, all of which appear at times in Russia), genre, and style. Examples come primarily from the work of canonic poets. A distinction is drawn between folkloric and literary verse, which intersected only infrequently. Some attention is devoted to the ways that Russian poetry was indebted to Polish, German, and French models. The focus is on two periods: the eighteenth century, when secular Russian literature first began to flourish, and the ‘Golden Age’ of Aleksandr Pushkin.

This chapter provides a short history of folklore collection and an overview of the genres privileged by Russian folklorists. In the early 1800s, folklorists began writing down, editing, and publishing creative oral performance, primarily that of peasants, because it was thought that these performances reflected ancient traditions that had been passed down for centuries. In the course of transforming oral culture into print collections, genres were identified and codified. The epic (bylina) and the fairytale (skazka) were among the genres most prioritised. Their particular formal features served to anchor a diverse genre system that included historical songs, religious verses, legends, and mythological stories. The chapter identifies characteristic events and stock characters, as well as features of style, structure, and performance typical of these genres of narrative folklore. It concludes by commenting on the reciprocal relationship between folklore and literature.

This chapter explores connections between early Greek and Near Eastern narrative poetry and demonstrates how the Eastern Mediterranean context can help situate early Greek epic in an ancient cross-cultural framework. The chapter addresses methodological questions about how Near Eastern poetry has been related to Homer and Hesiod, and provides the literary-historical coordinates of the relevant Sumero-Akkadian, Hurro-Hittite and Ugaritic corpora. Given its particular closeness to Homer, the chapter discusses the Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic among other works, as part of a broader thematic comparison of poetic composition and concepts of the cosmos and heroism. Ballesteros carefully outlines the various factors that may explain similarities and considers directions for future comparisons involving work on literary criticism, oral tradition, scribal culture and world mythology.

Chapter 14 traces the development of Romanticism and positions Goethe within it. It addresses the factors that shaped Romanticism, such as the rise of the prose novel and the revival of interest in folklore, and positions the movement in relation to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Above all, the chapter demonstrates that – despite his well-known ambivalence about aspects of Romanticism – Goethe contributed to it throughout his life, paving the way for it with his early works, and embodying many of its tendencies later on, above all in Faust.

This chapter deals with the fornaldarsögur (sagas of olden times), defined as legendary sagas about events in Nordic countries before the settlement of Iceland. It sets out the evidence of their popularity and describes the extent of their geographical settings. After noting their stylistic similarities to Íslendingasögur, the discussion moves on to place them within the larger European and heroic tradition, outlining the material they share with Old English and Middle High German literature and their links to eddic and skaldic verse. The influences of French courtly literature, religious literature and classical sources are explored. The folkloric dimension of the fornaldarsögur is pointed out, and the possibility of classifying the sagas as generic hybrids is suggested. Next the transmission of fornaldarsögur is discussed, followed by a reassessment of how the corpus might be divided into subgroups. The chapter then discusses possible composition dates and provides an analysis of the emergence of the genre, including the influence of Saxo’s Gesta Danorum. It ends with a discussion of fantastical narrative elements, which led to the label lygisögur (‘lying sagas’).

This chapter examines encounters around mental illness that played out within mandate Palestine’s hybrid legal system. Issues of mental competency and legal responsibility were debated across civil and religious courts, but this chapter focuses on the criminal courtroom and criminal insanity defences. Criminal insanity defences forced mandate judges, medical experts, and lay witnesses to debate what forms of behaviour and thought were evidence of mental illness, and what should, by contrast, be considered normal, ‘rational’, and therefore punishable for a given defendant. Through a close reading of two exemplary cases, this chapter moves beyond the historiography’s focus on cultural difference to highlight how different bodies of knowledge – psychiatric, social, and folkloric – were put to work to define the ‘normal’ in relation to other axes of identity like age, class, and gender. A third case, which played out against the backdrop of the Palestinian great revolt, meanwhile reveals how understandings of the ‘normal’ could be warped by wider political circumstances, with life-or-death consequences for defendants.

This chapter reconstructs the dynamics of the initial encounter between the British and the question of mental illness in Palestine into the 1920s. Far from recapitulating a familiar narrative about the colonial introduction of psychiatry as a moment of rupture, it instead offers a multi-layered account of the opening of the first government mental hospital at Bethlehem, in order to highlight how the British were in fact latecomers to an ongoing history of psychiatry in Palestine. Well before the British occupation of 1917, Palestinians had recourse to a range of medical and non-medical options for the management of the mentally ill, and those existing understandings, experiences, and institutions crucially shaped how the British responded to mental illness across these formative years. As well as tracing the establishment of a key institution, this chapter also introduces a central figure in the history of psychiatry in mandate Palestine: Dr Mikhail Shedid Malouf.

Chapter Eleven presents Romanticism as a nationalist phenomenon. After defining Romantic nationalism, it reviews three intersecting phenomena central not only to European Romanticism but also to nationalism: the linguistic revolution, the spread of idealism, and the rise of historicist dialectics. In each case, the author shows how these Romantic principles spread transnationally across various media, influencing political thought and emerging nationalisms. The wide-ranging chapter addresses France’s revolutionary nationalism, recuperated under the Restoration, and even more importantly the German nationalism that arose in reaction to French hegemony, but also touches on other Northern, Central and Eastern-European nations that have so far received little coverage in the volume, including, among others, Finland, Latvia, Estonia, Ireland, the Netherlands, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, and Albania. Its looks at the influence of philology on folklore, and on other literary genres such as the national epic, the patriotic hymn, and the historical novel, as well as the other arts, including music, architecture, and painting. Leerssen argues that Jacob Grimm and his teacher, the legal scholar Carl von Savigny, played central roles in the development of Romantic nationalism and of the notion of Volksgeist.

In this chapter I give an account of how I remember my childhood in the melodious echoes of songs my mother continues to sing in my mind, punctuating the crucial decades of the 1950s and 1960s, or 1330s and 1340s, to be more precise on our own calendar, in conjunction with historic events that stormed my homeland during this fateful time and then by extension much deeper and longer into history, culture, context – into religion, art, poetry, philosophy, and mysticism. I remember and I forget and I write and I wonder. I do all of these as an adult looking back. I detail how I wrote this book in the early hours of the morning, when most of the world around me was fast asleep, and as the sun rises and the room becomes bright, only the reflections of those memories linger about me. In the darkness of my room and the brightness of the laptop screen on which I wrote, I was reassured of a window that has opened into the womb into which I was conceived.

The introduction articulates the problem of the origins of Britain’s folkloric beings and traces the various ways in which scholars have tackled (or sidestepped) the problem, from John Aubrey to the present day. The introduction seeks to explain why scholars became wary of engaging with folkloric origins as a historical question, critiques previous approaches to the history of folkloric beings, and presents the book’s new approach in the context of current methodologies in the study of the history of popular religion. The introduction then outlines the structure of the book

Leo Tolstoy wrote throughout his career about Russian peasants, first at a class-inflected distance but later with admiration for their clothing, labor, and religious and moral feelings. As a Count, he automatically held a particular position vis-à-vis peasants, especially before the 1861 emancipation. His literary works and teaching tales depict peasants variously, sometimes idealizing an individual (from Platon Karataev in War and Peace to Alyosha the Pot), other times looking with distrust or frustration at peasant groups and their stubborn opposition to farming innovations. Eventually, Tolstoy famously adopted peasant garb, practiced many kinds of peasant crafts and labor, and enthusiastically communicated with peasant and sectarian thinkers, admiring their simple Christian faith. His primers for peasant children and collections of teaching tales often picked up folktales, paring their style down to the extreme simplicity that he considered typical and preferable. Toward the end of his life Tolstoy sought out the opinions and experiences of Russian peasant laborers in works of passionately engaged journalism. Major figures in Russian revolutionary movements (Lenin, Plekhanov) admired his insights, letting his authority in depicting peasant life continue into the Soviet period.

“The Tree” examines lynching souvenirs in the context of the emerging tourist economies of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century southern United States. The chapter focuses on mementos taken from lynching trees as well as the overlaps between this practice and other forms of landscape documentation and tourism. Through this study, the chapter also charts the overlaps between different object categories, particularly souvenirs and relics, as the image of the South became an increasingly commericalized and consumable one. This study of lynching souvenirs thus makes an argument for the inextricability of southern identity from its foundations in racial violence.

Views of Africa in the Black press evolved dramatically in the ninety years covered by this volume. The first generation of Afro-Latin American journalists had grown up with African parents and grandparents and were often sympathetic to their social and cultural practices. By the turn of the century doctrines of scientific racism, with their visions of Africans and their descendants as the bearers of genetic and cultural inferiority, led to much more negative views of Latin America's African heritage, even within the Black press. Emerging critiques of scientific racism in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s produced a rehabilitation of that heritage, though some doubts persisted. Ethiopia’s tenacious resistance against Italian invasions in the 1890s and 1930s, the region’s role in World War II, and decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s further raised Africa’s profile and image in the Black papers.