ABSTRACT
The special issue of the Journal of American Folklore in 1971 which was reprinted in 1972 as a book, Toward New Perspectives in Folklore, edited by Americo Paredes and Richard Bauman. The recording of folktales goes back several centuries, at least; but the beginnings of modern folklore studies is generally credited to Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm who not only began systematically collecting German folktales from living informants early in the last century, but also proposed a theory about their origins. The Finnish School of folklore, which is actually an international one, goes back almost to the time of the Grimm brothers, but is perhaps the most important one. The context of folklore will be discussed by Dan Ben-Amos of the University of Pennsylvania. Malinowski repeatedly emphasized the importance of context. “The text, of course, is extremely important, but without the context it remains lifeless.
