A history of racial tensions and interactions on the African continent. A very good softcover copy. Light spotting to back cover. Tight binding. Clean, unmarked pages. NOT ex-library. Indexed. 376pgs. Shipped Weight: Under 1 kilogram. Category: history; Inventory No: 018158.

African Images (Patterns in literary art)

Scheub, Harold

Webster Division/McGraw-Hill

In this marvelous collection of hundreds of fascinating, mysterious, and revealing tales, Harold Scheub captures the immense sweep and diversity of African mythology. Scheub offers an unprecedented collection of 400 stories, arranged alphabetically, that touch on virtually every aspect of religious belief. Here are gods and goddesses, epic heroes and divine tricksters, along with epics of the world's origins, the struggle between the human and the divine, and much more. Scheub covers the entire continent, from the mouth of the Nile to the shores of the Cape of Good Hope, including North African as well as sub-Saharan cultures. Here, for example, is the tale of Abu Zayd (from the Bani Hilal of Tunisia), an epic hero who battles a jinni; and here too is a myth of how the moon and the toad created the first man and woman, from the Soko of Congo. Scheub not only retells each story, but provides information about the respective belief system, the main characters, and related stories or variants. Perhaps most important, Scheub emphasizes the role of mythmaker as storyteller--as a performer for an audience. He explores various techniques, from the rhythmic movements of a Zulu mythmaker's hands to the way a storyteller will play on the familiar context of other myths within her cultural context. In A Dictionary of African Mythology, Harold Scheub has constructed an invaluable bridge to the richly diverse oral cultures of Africa. In this magnificent collection, he not only provides hundreds of fascinating myths, but recaptures their cultural contexts--in which story and storyteller, tradition and performance, all merge.

A Dictionary of African Mythology: The Mythmaker as Storyteller

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Oxford University Press

This collection of fascinating and revealing tales captures the sprawling diversity of African mythology. Four hundred alphabetically arranged entries touch on virtually every aspect of African religious belief, from Africa's great epic themes (dualistic gods, divine tricksters, creator gods, and heroes) to descriptions of major mythic systems (the Dogon, the Asante, and the San) and beyond. Scheub covers the entire continent, from the mouth of the Nile to the shores of the Cape of Good Hope, including North African as well as sub-Saharan cultures. His retellings provide information about the respective belief system, the main characters, and related stories or variants. Perhaps most important, Scheub emphasizes the role of mythmaker as storyteller--as a performer for an audience. He studies various techniques, from the rhythmic movements of a Zulu mythmaker's hands to the way a storyteller will play on the familiar context of other myths within her cultural context. An invaluable bridge to the richly diverse oral cultures of Africa, this collection uncovers a place where story and storyteller, tradition and performance, all merge.

Reference

Encyclopedias & Subject Guides

Signed by author / inscribed to his father / dated / near fine condition

The Xhosa Ntsomi (Oxford library of African literature)

Literature & Fiction

Clarendon Press

Product Description In the years between the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960 and the Soweto Uprising of 1976—a period that was both the height of the apartheid system in South Africa and, in retrospect, the beginning of its end—Harold Scheub went to Africa to collect stories. With tape-recorder and camera in hand, Scheub registered the testaments of Swati, Xhosa, Ndebele, and Zulu storytellers, farming people who lived in the remote reaches of rural South Africa. While young people fought in the streets of Soweto and South African writers made the world aware of apartheid’s evils, the rural storytellers resisted apartheid in their own way, using myth and metaphor to preserve their traditions and confront their oppressors. For more than 20 years, Scheub kept the promise he made to the storytellers to publish his translations of their stories only when freedom came to South Africa. The Tongue Is Fire presents these voices of South African oral tradition—the historians, the poets, the epic-performers, the myth-makers—documenting their enduring faith in the power of the word to sustain tradition in the face of determined efforts to distort or eliminate it. These texts are a tribute to the storytellers who have always, in periods of crisis, exercised their art to inspire their own people. Review “Inkululeku! Freedom! The word is beautiful, the word is precious. We have struggled against this political system from the beginning, we have nothing to be ashamed of. Our young people and our old have died striving for a better world. Our struggle will be successful, but it must never be forgotten. You must preserve our words, carry them to the wider world, but preserve them too for our posterity, that our children may never forget what we struggled for, what we lost, what we sought to gain. Freedom. Inkululeko.”—Mandla Madlala, Zulu storyteller About the Author Harold Scheub is professor of African languages and literature at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. To record oral traditions he has walked more than 6000 miles through South Africa, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, and Lesotho. He is the editor of Nongenile Masithathu Zenani’s The World and the Word: Tales and Observations from Xhosa Oral Tradition, also published by the University of Wisconsin Press, and the author of The African Storyteller. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. "Inkululeku! Freedom! The word is beautiful, the word is precious. We have struggled against this political system from the beginning, we have nothing to be ashamed of. Our young people and our old have died striving for a better world. Our struggle will be successful, but it must never be forgotten. You must preserve our words, carry them to the wider world, but preserve them too for our posterity, that our children may never forget what we struggled for, what we lost, what we sought to gain. Freedom. Inkululeko."-Mandla Madlala, Zulu storyteller

The Tongue Is Fire: South African Storytellers and Apartheid

History

Africa

University of Wisconsin Press

In the years between the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960 and the Soweto Uprising of 1976—a period that was both the height of the apartheid system in South Africa and, in retrospect, the beginning of its end—Harold Scheub went to Africa to collect stories. With tape-recorder and camera in hand, Scheub registered the testaments of Swati, Xhosa, Ndebele, and Zulu storytellers, farming people who lived in the remote reaches of rural South Africa. While young people fought in the streets of Soweto and South African writers made the world aware of apartheid’s evils, the rural storytellers resisted apartheid in their own way, using myth and metaphor to preserve their traditions and confront their oppressors. For more than 20 years, Scheub kept the promise he made to the storytellers to publish his translations of their stories only when freedom came to South Africa. The Tongue Is Fire presents these voices of South African oral tradition—the historians, the poets, the epic-performers, the myth-makers—documenting their enduring faith in the power of the word to sustain tradition in the face of determined efforts to distort or eliminate it. These texts are a tribute to the storytellers who have always, in periods of crisis, exercised their art to inspire their own people.

What is the essence of story? How does the storyteller convey meaning? Leading scholar Harold Scheub tackles these questions and more, demonstrating that the power of story lies in emotion.     While others have focused on the importance of structure in the art of story, Scheub emphasizes emotion. He shows how an expert storyteller uses structural elements—image, rhythm, and narrative—to shape a story's fundamental emotional content. The storyteller uses traditional images, repetition, and linear narrative to move the audience past the story’s surface of morals and ideas, and make connections to their past, present, and future. To guide the audience on this emotional journey is the storyteller’s art.     The traditional stories from South African, Xhosa, and San cultures included in the book lend persuasive support to Scheub’s. These stories speak for themselves, demonstrating that a skilled performer can stir emotions despite the obstacles of space, time, and culture.

Story

What is the essence of story? How does the storyteller convey meaning? Leading scholar Harold Scheub tackles these questions and more, demonstrating that the power of story lies in emotion. While others have focused on the importance of structure in the art of story, Scheub emphasizes emotion. He shows how an expert storyteller uses structural elements—image, rhythm, and narrative—to shape a story's fundamental emotional content. The storyteller uses traditional images, repetition, and linear narrative to move the audience past the story’s surface of morals and ideas, and make connections to their past, present, and future. To guide the audience on this emotional journey is the storyteller’s art. The traditional stories from South African, Xhosa, and San cultures included in the book lend persuasive support to Scheub’s. These stories speak for themselves, demonstrating that a skilled performer can stir emotions despite the obstacles of space, time, and culture.

The Poem in the Story: Music, Poetry, and Narrative

Fact and fiction meet at the boundaries, the betwixt and between where transformations occur. This is the area of ambiguity where fiction and fact become endowed with meaning, and this is the area—where ambiguity, irony, and metaphor join forces—that Harold Scheub exposes in all its nuanced and evocative complexity in The Poem in the Story. In a career devoted to exploring the art of the African storyteller, Scheub has conducted some of the most interesting and provocative investigations into nonverbal aspects of storytelling, the complex relationship between artist and audience, and, most dramatically, the role played by poetry in storytelling. This book is his most daring effort yet, an unconventional work that searches out what makes a story artistically engaging and emotionally evocative, the metaphorical center that Scheub calls "the poem in the story." Drawing on extensive fieldwork in southern Africa and decades of experience as a researcher and teacher, Scheub develops an original approach—a blend of field notes, diary entries, photographs, and texts of stories and poems—that guides readers into a new way of viewing, even experiencing, meaning in a story. Though this work is largely focused on African storytelling, its universal applications emerge when Scheub brings the work of storytellers as different as Shakespeare and Faulkner into the discussion.

History & Criticism

What do you call 600 lawyers at the bottom of the sea? Marc Galanter calls it an opportunity to investigate the meanings of a rich and time-honored genre of American humor: lawyer jokes. Lowering the Bar analyzes hundreds of jokes from Mark Twain classics to contemporary anecdotes about Dan Quayle, Johnnie Cochran, and Kenneth Starr. Drawing on representations of law and lawyers in the mass media, political discourse, and public opinion surveys, Galanter finds that the increasing reliance on law has coexisted uneasily with anxiety about the legalization of society. Informative and always entertaining, his book explores the tensions between Americans deep-seated belief in the law and their ambivalence about lawyers."

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Scheub, Harold. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Scheub, Harold

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Scheub, Harold. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

African Images (Patterns in literary art)

A Dictionary of African Mythology: The Mythmaker as Storyteller

A Dictionary of African Mythology: The Mythmaker as Storyteller

The Xhosa Ntsomi (Oxford library of African literature)

The Tongue Is Fire: South African Storytellers and Apartheid

The Tongue Is Fire: South African Storytellers and Apartheid

Story

Story

The Poem in the Story: Music, Poetry, and Narrative

The Poem in the Story: Music, Poetry, and Narrative