Serpent & Swan: Animal Bride Folklore & Literature [1 ed.] 0939923688, 9780939923687
The Serpent and the Swan is a history and analysis of animal bride tales from antiquity to the present. The animal bride
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English Pages 276 [284] Year 2001
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- Author / Uploaded
- Boria Sax
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/An
and sociology. This gives the field a special richness, yet, for the same reason, people sometimes wonder if it is truly a discipline at all. Several scholars such as Stith Thompson and Richard Dorson have attempted to professionalize folklore. Sometimes at least, it now enjoys the paraphernalia of an academic discipline such as chairs and journals. In the late twentieth century, however, the very division of knowledge into disciplines has begun to break down. Scientists focus on increasingly narrow specialties, and many researchers no longer make any attempt to keep abreast of entire fields such as biology or chemistry. Those in the humanities, by contrast, now probably specialize less by material than by methodology. English departments are now divided into Deconstructionists, New Historicists, Structural¬ ists, Marxists, Freudians, Jungians, and advocates of many other methodologies, who often view one another with con¬ sternation. The time when every discipline was set apart by a unique method is, if it ever existed, long past. The distinc¬ tions between disciplines describe little more than institu¬ tional bureaucracy. I am, for this reason, not in the least ashamed to be eclectic. The focus on a single story, with all its permutations through the ages, can give a study more sub¬ stantial unity than the empty conventions of academia. My purpose in this book is to give a brief, inevitably in¬ complete, history of the animal bride in both folklore and literature as well as to explore the philosophical and ethical implications of the animal bride tale. With a topic of such vastness, it is necessary to set some limitations. Accordingly, I concentrate primarily, though not exclusively, on certain Eurasian versions of the animal bride tale. In comparison with the vast range of the cycle, the variants I discuss are few indeed. They are a bit like some interlocking threads re¬ maining from an intricate embroidery. Yet at times such fragments may tell an archeologist much about how the entire textile once appeared. 7
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