Oral-Formulaic Theory: Annotated Bibliography

Francis L. Utley. "Folk Literature: An Operational Definition." Journal of American Folklore, 74:193-206. Rpt. in The Study of Folklore. Ed. Alan Dundes. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1965. pp. 7-24.

In discussing proper, productive ways of collecting and classifying oral literature, he mentions the problem of separating true oral material from material influenced by written tradition and of editorially emending or "rewriting" true folk texts, taking as an example of the latter process the great nineteenth-century Serbian ethnographer Vuk Stefan Karadzic.
Area: FK, SC, CP