Oral-Formulaic Theory: Annotated Bibliography

Bruce Jackson. "Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me": Narrative Poetry from Black Oral Tradition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

In the section on "Telling and Learning Toasts" (pp. 3-12), he mentions formulas in the ritual insult genre and notes that acquiring the ability to perform these traditional poems "is not unlike the learning process undergone by the Serbian singers of heroic narratives described by Albert Lord in The Singer of Tales" (p. 5). The greater part of the volume is devoted to the toasts themselves, with commentary.
Area: AA, US, CP