This paper examines the impact of digital media on the relationship between writing, performance, and textuality from the perspective of literate verbal artists in Mali. It considers why some highly educated verbal artists in urban Africa self-identify as writers despite the oralizing properties of new media, and despite the fact that their own works circulate entirely through performance. The motivating factors are identified as a desire to present themselves as composers rather than as performers of texts, and to differentiate their work from that of minimally educated performers of texts associated with traditional orality.

This article provides a brief overview of the Shandong fast tale tradition, a Chinese oral performance genre that began in rural northern China approximately four hundred years ago. Included in this overview are brief descriptions of the origins, audience composition, tale length, repertoire, and major characteristics of the stories and performances. Following these descriptions is a discussion of the expressive and rhetorical devices used by the tale-tellers as they perform live, such as formulaic language, repetition, character roles, shifts in speech register, body language, facial expressions, memory, onomatopoeia, physical humor, and hyperbolic language.

The article investigates stories from Kyrgyzstan depicting the adventures of a folk hero in tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union. These specimens of oral tradition were published in the Soviet and post-Soviet era and are therefore situated at the interface of the oral and written realms. The authors argue that these tales should not be dismissed as de-contextualized and deprived of their original meaning, but as re-contextualized narratives that have been adjusted according to changing power relations.

The Byzantine epic Digenes Akrites has similarities with ancient and medieval Iranian traditions that, in consideration of the epic’s Eastern settings, suggest Iranian influences. Digenes resembles dragon-slaying heroes of other Indo-European traditions. He also resembles the Irish hero Cú Chulainn in that he is not psychologically fit to live in the midst of the community that depends on his protection. Freudian readings of Digenes’ encounters with the dragon and the Amazon Maximou are proposed.

Mann argues that a rare text of the Skazanie o Mamaevom poboishche comes from an early, fifteenth-century redaction that scholars could never locate—a redaction that is the prototype for all the redactions that have been studied heretofore. He maintains that unique parallels between this redaction and the Slovo o polka Igoreve support the hypothesis that the Igor Tale was an oral epic song in a tradition that actually continued into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when oral tales about the Kulikovo Battle (1380) were composed. He places the new parallels in the context of other evidence for oral composition in the Igor Tale.

Luka Marjanović (1844-1920) collected more than 250,000 verses from epic singers in Croatian and Bosnian regions in 1886-88, excerpts of which were published in 1898-99 in the seminal two-volume anthology, Hrvatske narodne pjesme [Croatian Folk Songs] III-IV. Marjanović’s first fieldwork report, however, is virtually unknown, dating from an 1864 preface written for a songbook. This article provides a translation of that preface, with accompanying notes and introduction, and thus supplements current scholarship on nineteenth-century oral epic studies.

In Ainu oral literature there are ubiquitous motifs or story-patterns shared among stories. These stories are integrated by a certain motif, and collectively compose interrelated corpora. To understand each individual narrative, we should refer to other stories based on traditional referentiality. This article illustrates how Ainu oral literature can be interpreted, focusing on one of its major motifs: the trade between the Ainu and the Wajin, or ethnic Japanese. In the process, the historical consciousness of the Ainu narratives is also considered.

The lyric songs of Pir Sultan Abdal provide one of the richest perspectives on the historical construction, communal perceptions, and creative impetus of Alevi culture. While the traditional verse and persona associated with Pir Sultan Abdal have engendered a large body of commentary and texts in Turkey since the early twentieth century, Alevi lyric song (deyiş), and Pir Sultan Abdal in particular, have received little attention in English-language scholarship. This article presents an introductory work in English on Pir Sultan Abdal, providing a presentation of this significant persona by focusing on encounters in text and expressive culture in order to establish the beginnings of a broad interpretive perspective. More specifically, the self-naming convention (mahlas), as exemplified in the case of Pir Sultan Abdal, is identified as a largely overlooked lyric device requiring further scholarly and comparative investigation.

Based in oral poetic and ritual theory, this article proposes that ritual scenes in Homer’s Iliad reflect unique compositional constraints beyond those found in other kinds of typical scenes. The focus is on oath-sacrifices and commensal sacrifices. Both ritual scene types exhibit strong identifying features, although they differ in their formal particulars and cultural implications. It is argued that both sorts of sacrificial scenes preserve especially ancient ritual patterns that may have parallels in Anatolian texts.