ABSTRACT
This book is about traditional knowledge and practice that people label and study as “folklore.” With reference to “folk” as group or everyday life and “lore” as cultural or oral learning and expression, the term gained wide circulation in the nineteenth century to cover a range of material that had been treated separately in historical and literary annals: speech, tales, songs, dances, and customs, for example. The connecting thread was the idea of tradition, and a process of acquiring and transmitting it. Indeed, “folk” could also be construed as an adjective meaning “traditional” to describe lore. As part of the “vernacular,” following linguistic usage, folklore evoked an image of intergenerational transmission and localized culture. Unlike the pantheon of literary and art works attributed to a single author, often anonymous folk productions represented variable, multiple existence across time and space. Folklore raised cultural and psychological puzzles to solve because for many social critics it was not supposed to be around after the Industrial Revolution. Yet there it was, even among the elites of society, and for many literati, it held a fascinating aesthetic, and even political, appeal.
