Children's Literature: Storytelling

The domei is a popular narrative art form among the Mende people of Sierra Leone. Although it is a traditional form, the narratives are not remembered or retold, but on each occasion the performers recreate out of a common stock of characters and plots domeisia, which are singular and sometimes brilliant expressions of a singular, and often brilliant, culture. In this book Donald Cosentino presents a large selection of these narratives, as he collected them in dramatic performance on the verandahs and around the cooking fires of a Mende village.

This second edition features three new Zuni stories, updated transcriptions of stories from the original edition, a bibliography, and a new preface and introduction.

Describes the background of the myths of the Indian cultures of the North American continent, some of which have the same themes as myths of other world cultures.

Based on a corpus of Texan oral narratives collected by the author over the past fifteen years, this study presents an analysis of the literary qualities or orally performed verbal art, focusing on the significance of its social context. Although the tales included are all from Texas, they are representative of oral storytelling traditions in other parts of the United States, including tall tales, hunting stories, local character anecdotes, accounts of practical jokes, and so on.

Consult this work for descriptions of folktales and references to more than 700 published sources of folktales. Includes thorough indexing by subject, motif, title, ethnic group and country of origin.

Consult this work for descriptions of folktales and references to more than 700 published sources of folktales. Includes thorough indexing by subject, motif, title, ethnic group and country of origin.

MacDonald's classic story-telling how-to primer returns, filled with updated resources, classic stories from around the globe, guidelines to tell them with gusto, as well as advice on finding, learning, and telling new tales. Twenty stories, complete with suggestions for chants, songs, dialects, repeating lines, and audience participation, make these multicultural tales easy to learn and tell while satisfying young audiences.