Description:
DuBois draws on sets of lyric songs from England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, and Finland to explore the question of meaning in folklore, especially the role of traditional audiences in appraising and understanding nonnarrative songs.
Brief description:
Thomas A. DuBois is professor of Scandinavian studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of a number of books, including Nordic Religions in the Viking Age.
Review Quotes:
"Thomas DuBois's new book demonstrates an extraordinary range of languages and cultural traditions and should appeal to a correspondingly broad readership. He writes, too, for Everyman--a skillful elucidator of lyric in the clothing of a theory-oriented folklorist. DuBois's schema for tracking the various forms of reception and how they govern 'meaning, ' especially in performed literature, is comprehensive, but the lover of individual poems will not find that they have been sacrificed to theory." --Joseph Harris, Francis Lee Higginson Professor of English Literature and Professor of Folklore, Harvard University