Gillian Bennett
Biographic Data
| ID | 3789883 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Gillian Bennett |
| GIVEN NAMES | Gillian |
| FAMILY NAME | Bennett |
| SIGNATURE | BENNETT G |
| AFFILIATIONS | The Folklore Society |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 70 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 32 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1985 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
W. F. H. (Bill) Nicolaisen, 1927–2016
It is my sad task to report the loss of yet another old friend and colleague, our former President, Professor Wilhelm Fritz Hermann Nicolaisen, who died in February of this year at the age of eight
Co-habiting with Ghosts: Knowledge, Experience, Belief and the Domestic Uncanny
Co-habiting with Ghosts: Knowledge, Experience, Belief and the Domestic Uncanny." Folklore, 127(1), pp. 114–115
Keith K. Cunningham (April 1939–April 2013)
Tales of Kentucky Ghosts
William Lynwood Montell, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2010, 211 pp, $24.95 (hbk), ISBN 978-0-81312-593-1 Back in the early 1980s when I was writing my doctoral thesis, I was enormously
Legends and Landscape
Edited by Terry Gunnell. Reyjavik: University of Iceland Press, 2008., B&W illus. 352 pp. £25.00 (pbk), ISBN 978-9-979-54806-5 This nice-looking book is a compilation based on plenary papers given
The Story Is True: The Art and Meaning of Telling Stories
Book Review| October 01 2011 The Story Is True: The Art and Meaning of Telling Stories The Story Is True: The Art and Meaning of Telling Stories. By Bruce Jackson. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007. Pp. Gillian Bennett Gillian Bennett Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of American Folklore (2011) 124 (494): 339–340. https://doi.org/10.5406/jamerfolk.124.494.0339 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook T…
Bill Scott (1923–2005): In Memoriam
Bill Scott—Australian folklorist, song-writer, storyteller and poet—died just before Christmas 2005. He had been in increasingly poor health for some time, then a stroke in early December spelt the
Towards a Revaluation of the Legend of “Saint” William of Norwich and its Place in the Blood Libel Legend: Research Article
The legend of William of Norwich is extremely well known and often quoted in discussions of defamatory folklore. However, since I started working on it three or four years ago I have found that there are surprisingly few folkloric analyses. Leaving aside those who have attempted to believe the story and to use it as anti-Jewish propaganda, most of the respectable work has been done by historians and has tended to concentrate either on debunking t…
William of Norwich and the Expulsion of the Jews: Topics, Notes and Comments
In the last issue of Folklore I examined the legend of Saint William of Norwich and attempted to revaluate its place in the blood libel legend (Bennett 2005). In that paper I sought to tackle some of the more folkloric questions, such as, firstly, whether there is any essential difference between the primary source and the legend we now know and, if so, what its significance is, and secondly whether it is really the case that this was the first r…
Life with Cush and Do-Dunns: The Cultural Life of an English Village in the Inter-War Years: Humour, Reminiscence and Rivalry
The analysis presented in this article relies heavily on a clear understanding of the context particularly of the geography of the region from which the data is drawn. To provide background, the discussion begins with a brief description of the Peak District of England, where the wider scene is set, then comes into closer focus, considering first one of the peakland towns, Buxton, and the villages that look to that town for goods and services, th…
Folklore
And there's Always this Great Hole Inside that Hurts”: An Empirical Study of Bereavement in Later Life
Stage theoretical approaches to bereavement have long been used in both academic and clinical work. Their impact has been so great that they have permeated lay understanding of bereavement, to become, as Tony Walter puts it, the “clinical lore” of bereavement. This paper examines this clinical lore from the perspective of older women's narratives of widowhood. We suggest that, though these widows experience the sorts of emotions stage theories pr…
Charlotte Sophia Burne: Shropshire Folklorist, First Woman President of the Folklore Society, and First Woman Editor of Folklore . Part 2: Update and Preliminary Bibliography
Update Introduction Since Gordon Ashman and wrote Part 1 of this study of the life and works of Charlotte (Ashman and Bennett 2000), further research has uncovered additional information, resolved one or two queries, and shown that some of the details were not quite correct. For the past eighteen months, Dr J. C. has been transcribing the contents of previously-unread chest of diaries, family letters, and notebooks. Amongst these were diaries kep…
Alas, Poor Ghost
The presence of the dead: An empirical study
It is very common for newly bereaved people to hold on to their spouse's possessions, and talk to photographs of them, or to feel that they are still communicating with them. A post-bereavement experience that encapsulates these themes, providing closeness, communication, and the continuation of an important relationship, is the sense of the dead person's presence. At its weakest this is a feeling that one is somehow being watched; at its stronge…
Charlotte Sophia Burne: Shropshire Folklorist, First Woman President of the Folklore Society, and First Woman Editor of Folklore . Part 1: A Life and Appreciation
Charlotte Burne (1850 1923) served the Folklore Society (FLS) for forty years.She was editor of the massive Shropshire Folklore (1883 6), and the second revised edition of the FLS's only of cial guide, The Handbook of Folklore (1914).She authored over seventy folklore papers, notes and reviews in Folklore and its predecessors, as well as several articles in newspapers and magazines ; she was the rst woman editor of this journal (1900 08) and the …
Alas, Poor Ghost! Traditions of Belief in Story and Discourse
Alas, Poor Ghost! Traditions of Belief in Story and Discourse. By Gillian Bennett. (Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 1999. Pp. 232, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. $39.95 cloth, $21.95 paper) In a further analysis of field research first presented in Traditions of Belief Women and Supernatural (Pelican, 1987), as well as material collected during a recent study of widow's memorates, Gillian Bennett explores ways in which elderly Br…
The Vanishing Hitchhiker at Fifty-Five
INTRODUCTION The legend of Vanishing Hitchhiker hardly needs an introduction. The core concerns traveller who offers ride to vulnerable-looking pedestrian, only to find his passenger has disappeared without trace. Later investigations reveal that passenger was supernatural entity, not living human being at all. The very first issue of this journal (then California Folklore Quarterly) carried an article on this written by two young anthropologists…
Death in Folklore: A selective listing from the journal of the Folklore Society
Folklore journals are probably not the first (nor even the last) resource that scholars in death studies think of consulting. Yet, for over 100 years, folklorists have maintained an interest in the cultural aspects of death and burial—funeral customs; popular beliefs about death, dying and the afterlife; the folklore of forewarnings of death; and so on. An electronic search of folklore sources discloses over 500 articles, notes and queries about …
Camera, Lights, Action!”: The British General Election 1992 as Narrative Event
If proof were ever needed of the ubiquity of narrative in public life, then the manner in which rival political claims were debated in the run-up to the British General Election of 9 April 1992 would give that proof. In the month 12 March to 8 April, the British electorate were part of a nation-wide story-making endeavour by politicians and press; on 9 April, they were invited to provide the denouement for the story that had been unfolded for the…
David Buchan, 1939–1994
When his own book, The Ballad and the Folk, was published in 1972, David took issue with all the theoretical attitudes implicit in this anecdote. Influenced by the work of Albert Lord and, before him, of Milman Parry, he argued that the great international story songs, usually mistakenly referred to in school poetry lessons as the Border Ballads, could only be understood as the product of oral singers using traditional techniques of re-creation a…
Geologists and Folklorists: "Cultural Evolution and "The Science of Folklore
L'A. explique l'adoption et le maintien d'une pensee evolutionniste du folklore a la « Folklore society » (FLS). Il montre l'importance des theories de la geologie et decrit la communaute scientifique de l'epoque dont voulait faire partie les folkloristes. Il s'interesse aux travaux de A. Lang, E. S. Hartland, E. Clodd, A. Nutt mais surtout a ceux de G. L. Gomme et a l'opposition entre les approches psychologique et historiques, entre l'anthropol…
Folklore Studies and the English Rural Myth
Academic folklorists today define their subject matter in a way which runs counter to popular conceptions of the field, both as regards the ‘lore’ and the ‘folk’ part of this old composite term. They see the ‘lore’ as a body of beliefs, activities, ways of making, saying and doing things and interacting with others that are acquired through informal, unofficial channels by the processes of socialising in family, occupational, or activity-related …
In Pursuit of Satan: The Police and the Occult
Contemporary Legend: An Insider's View
LATELY . . .' says Heda Jason,' 'something seems to be not quite as it should be with legend, cracks and flaws start to show up. At the Sheffield meetings disquieting questions are beginning to be asked.' I have been involved in the Sheffield seminars on contemporary legend since the first seminar in 1982-at one time or another as participant, conference organiser, co-editor of volumes of conference proceedings, and, for a short time, publication…
Alas, Poor Ghost! Traditions of Belief in Story and Discourse
Alas, Poor Ghost! Traditions of Belief in Story and Discourse. By Gillian Bennett. (Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 1999. Pp. 232, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. $39.95 cloth, $21.95 paper) In a further analysis of field research first presented in Traditions of Belief Women and Supernatural (Pelican, 1987), as well as material collected during a recent study of widow's memorates, Gillian Bennett explores ways in which elderly Br…
Geologists and Folklorists: "Cultural Evolution and "The Science of Folklore
L'A. explique l'adoption et le maintien d'une pensee evolutionniste du folklore a la « Folklore society » (FLS). Il montre l'importance des theories de la geologie et decrit la communaute scientifique de l'epoque dont voulait faire partie les folkloristes. Il s'interesse aux travaux de A. Lang, E. S. Hartland, E. Clodd, A. Nutt mais surtout a ceux de G. L. Gomme et a l'opposition entre les approches psychologique et historiques, entre l'anthropol…
Belief Stories: The Forgotten Genre
The Vanishing Hitchhiker at Fifty-Five
INTRODUCTION The legend of Vanishing Hitchhiker hardly needs an introduction. The core concerns traveller who offers ride to vulnerable-looking pedestrian, only to find his passenger has disappeared without trace. Later investigations reveal that passenger was supernatural entity, not living human being at all. The very first issue of this journal (then California Folklore Quarterly) carried an article on this written by two young anthropologists…
Ghost and Witch in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
seventeenth century witch, there is one curious aspect still left unexplored: that is, the mutual influence of the concepts of ghost and witch. Historians charting the development of the witch crazes have often been concerned with the basis of folklore out of which the stereotype of the witch arose-either to affirm its importance (Kittredge, Lea, Cohn)' or to deny it (Peters).2 But, as far as I am aware, in all the folkloristic material there has…
Folklore Studies and the English Rural Myth
Academic folklorists today define their subject matter in a way which runs counter to popular conceptions of the field, both as regards the ‘lore’ and the ‘folk’ part of this old composite term. They see the ‘lore’ as a body of beliefs, activities, ways of making, saying and doing things and interacting with others that are acquired through informal, unofficial channels by the processes of socialising in family, occupational, or activity-related …
Towards a Revaluation of the Legend of “Saint” William of Norwich and its Place in the Blood Libel Legend: Research Article
The legend of William of Norwich is extremely well known and often quoted in discussions of defamatory folklore. However, since I started working on it three or four years ago I have found that there are surprisingly few folkloric analyses. Leaving aside those who have attempted to believe the story and to use it as anti-Jewish propaganda, most of the respectable work has been done by historians and has tended to concentrate either on debunking t…
Charlotte Sophia Burne: Shropshire Folklorist, First Woman President of the Folklore Society, and First Woman Editor of Folklore . Part 1: A Life and Appreciation
Charlotte Burne (1850 1923) served the Folklore Society (FLS) for forty years.She was editor of the massive Shropshire Folklore (1883 6), and the second revised edition of the FLS's only of cial guide, The Handbook of Folklore (1914).She authored over seventy folklore papers, notes and reviews in Folklore and its predecessors, as well as several articles in newspapers and magazines ; she was the rst woman editor of this journal (1900 08) and the …
Contemporary Legend: An Insider's View
LATELY . . .' says Heda Jason,' 'something seems to be not quite as it should be with legend, cracks and flaws start to show up. At the Sheffield meetings disquieting questions are beginning to be asked.' I have been involved in the Sheffield seminars on contemporary legend since the first seminar in 1982-at one time or another as participant, conference organiser, co-editor of volumes of conference proceedings, and, for a short time, publication…
Legends and Landscape
Edited by Terry Gunnell. Reyjavik: University of Iceland Press, 2008., B&W illus. 352 pp. £25.00 (pbk), ISBN 978-9-979-54806-5 This nice-looking book is a compilation based on plenary papers given
William of Norwich and the Expulsion of the Jews: Topics, Notes and Comments
In the last issue of Folklore I examined the legend of Saint William of Norwich and attempted to revaluate its place in the blood libel legend (Bennett 2005). In that paper I sought to tackle some of the more folkloric questions, such as, firstly, whether there is any essential difference between the primary source and the legend we now know and, if so, what its significance is, and secondly whether it is really the case that this was the first r…
Narrative as Expository Discourse
BETWEEN JANUARY AND MAY 1981, I was interviewing people in Manchester (north west England) about the supranormal-ESP, psychic powers, the influence of the dead on and in the mundane world, and so on (Bennett 1985). During the course of these interviews, the respondents spontaneously told 153 narratives. The storytelling patterns revealed in this corpus have led me to doubt the universal applicability of the most commonly used model of oral narrat…
Heavenly Protection and Family Unity: The Concept of the Revenant among Elderly Urban Women
fieldwork which sought to discover both the supernatural beliefs of a modern urban community and also the rhetoric and other techniques through which those beliefs were presented to others. During that time I interviewed 140 people resident in Gatley, a middle-class suburb of Manchester. Most of the informants attended the same church, consulted the same medical practitioners and used the same shops, so they were a fairly homogeneous group of peo…
Co-habiting with Ghosts: Knowledge, Experience, Belief and the Domestic Uncanny
Co-habiting with Ghosts: Knowledge, Experience, Belief and the Domestic Uncanny." Folklore, 127(1), pp. 114–115
Camera, Lights, Action!”: The British General Election 1992 as Narrative Event
If proof were ever needed of the ubiquity of narrative in public life, then the manner in which rival political claims were debated in the run-up to the British General Election of 9 April 1992 would give that proof. In the month 12 March to 8 April, the British electorate were part of a nation-wide story-making endeavour by politicians and press; on 9 April, they were invited to provide the denouement for the story that had been unfolded for the…
Heavenly Protection and Family Unity: The Concept of the Revenant among Elderly Urban Women
fieldwork which sought to discover both the supernatural beliefs of a modern urban community and also the rhetoric and other techniques through which those beliefs were presented to others. During that time I interviewed 140 people resident in Gatley, a middle-class suburb of Manchester. Most of the informants attended the same church, consulted the same medical practitioners and used the same shops, so they were a fairly homogeneous group of peo…
Ghost and Witch in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
seventeenth century witch, there is one curious aspect still left unexplored: that is, the mutual influence of the concepts of ghost and witch. Historians charting the development of the witch crazes have often been concerned with the basis of folklore out of which the stereotype of the witch arose-either to affirm its importance (Kittredge, Lea, Cohn)' or to deny it (Peters).2 But, as far as I am aware, in all the folkloristic material there has…
Narrative as Expository Discourse
BETWEEN JANUARY AND MAY 1981, I was interviewing people in Manchester (north west England) about the supranormal-ESP, psychic powers, the influence of the dead on and in the mundane world, and so on (Bennett 1985). During the course of these interviews, the respondents spontaneously told 153 narratives. The storytelling patterns revealed in this corpus have led me to doubt the universal applicability of the most commonly used model of oral narrat…
‘And I Turned Round to Her and Said…’ A Preliminary Analysis of Shape and Structure in Women's Storytelling
LET me begin by explaining some of the background to this paper. For many years I have been interested in the ways in which tradition, belief and experience interact with each other; how they are communicated; and how the processes of communication modify the original belief, tradition or experience. These interests have brought me to the study of legends and, more particularly, memorates. Though recently there have been several attempts to under…
Notes and Comments
Belief Stories: The Forgotten Genre
Perspectives on Contemporary Legend. Volume II
Contemporary Legend: An Insider's View
LATELY . . .' says Heda Jason,' 'something seems to be not quite as it should be with legend, cracks and flaws start to show up. At the Sheffield meetings disquieting questions are beginning to be asked.' I have been involved in the Sheffield seminars on contemporary legend since the first seminar in 1982-at one time or another as participant, conference organiser, co-editor of volumes of conference proceedings, and, for a short time, publication…
In Pursuit of Satan: The Police and the Occult
Folklore Studies and the English Rural Myth
Academic folklorists today define their subject matter in a way which runs counter to popular conceptions of the field, both as regards the ‘lore’ and the ‘folk’ part of this old composite term. They see the ‘lore’ as a body of beliefs, activities, ways of making, saying and doing things and interacting with others that are acquired through informal, unofficial channels by the processes of socialising in family, occupational, or activity-related …
Geologists and Folklorists: "Cultural Evolution and "The Science of Folklore
L'A. explique l'adoption et le maintien d'une pensee evolutionniste du folklore a la « Folklore society » (FLS). Il montre l'importance des theories de la geologie et decrit la communaute scientifique de l'epoque dont voulait faire partie les folkloristes. Il s'interesse aux travaux de A. Lang, E. S. Hartland, E. Clodd, A. Nutt mais surtout a ceux de G. L. Gomme et a l'opposition entre les approches psychologique et historiques, entre l'anthropol…
David Buchan, 1939–1994
When his own book, The Ballad and the Folk, was published in 1972, David took issue with all the theoretical attitudes implicit in this anecdote. Influenced by the work of Albert Lord and, before him, of Milman Parry, he argued that the great international story songs, usually mistakenly referred to in school poetry lessons as the Border Ballads, could only be understood as the product of oral singers using traditional techniques of re-creation a…
Camera, Lights, Action!”: The British General Election 1992 as Narrative Event
If proof were ever needed of the ubiquity of narrative in public life, then the manner in which rival political claims were debated in the run-up to the British General Election of 9 April 1992 would give that proof. In the month 12 March to 8 April, the British electorate were part of a nation-wide story-making endeavour by politicians and press; on 9 April, they were invited to provide the denouement for the story that had been unfolded for the…
Death in Folklore: A selective listing from the journal of the Folklore Society
Folklore journals are probably not the first (nor even the last) resource that scholars in death studies think of consulting. Yet, for over 100 years, folklorists have maintained an interest in the cultural aspects of death and burial—funeral customs; popular beliefs about death, dying and the afterlife; the folklore of forewarnings of death; and so on. An electronic search of folklore sources discloses over 500 articles, notes and queries about …
The Vanishing Hitchhiker at Fifty-Five
INTRODUCTION The legend of Vanishing Hitchhiker hardly needs an introduction. The core concerns traveller who offers ride to vulnerable-looking pedestrian, only to find his passenger has disappeared without trace. Later investigations reveal that passenger was supernatural entity, not living human being at all. The very first issue of this journal (then California Folklore Quarterly) carried an article on this written by two young anthropologists…
Alas, Poor Ghost
The presence of the dead: An empirical study
It is very common for newly bereaved people to hold on to their spouse's possessions, and talk to photographs of them, or to feel that they are still communicating with them. A post-bereavement experience that encapsulates these themes, providing closeness, communication, and the continuation of an important relationship, is the sense of the dead person's presence. At its weakest this is a feeling that one is somehow being watched; at its stronge…
Charlotte Sophia Burne: Shropshire Folklorist, First Woman President of the Folklore Society, and First Woman Editor of Folklore . Part 1: A Life and Appreciation
Charlotte Burne (1850 1923) served the Folklore Society (FLS) for forty years.She was editor of the massive Shropshire Folklore (1883 6), and the second revised edition of the FLS's only of cial guide, The Handbook of Folklore (1914).She authored over seventy folklore papers, notes and reviews in Folklore and its predecessors, as well as several articles in newspapers and magazines ; she was the rst woman editor of this journal (1900 08) and the …
Alas, Poor Ghost! Traditions of Belief in Story and Discourse
Alas, Poor Ghost! Traditions of Belief in Story and Discourse. By Gillian Bennett. (Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 1999. Pp. 232, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. $39.95 cloth, $21.95 paper) In a further analysis of field research first presented in Traditions of Belief Women and Supernatural (Pelican, 1987), as well as material collected during a recent study of widow's memorates, Gillian Bennett explores ways in which elderly Br…
Folklore
And there's Always this Great Hole Inside that Hurts”: An Empirical Study of Bereavement in Later Life
Stage theoretical approaches to bereavement have long been used in both academic and clinical work. Their impact has been so great that they have permeated lay understanding of bereavement, to become, as Tony Walter puts it, the “clinical lore” of bereavement. This paper examines this clinical lore from the perspective of older women's narratives of widowhood. We suggest that, though these widows experience the sorts of emotions stage theories pr…
Charlotte Sophia Burne: Shropshire Folklorist, First Woman President of the Folklore Society, and First Woman Editor of Folklore . Part 2: Update and Preliminary Bibliography
Update Introduction Since Gordon Ashman and wrote Part 1 of this study of the life and works of Charlotte (Ashman and Bennett 2000), further research has uncovered additional information, resolved one or two queries, and shown that some of the details were not quite correct. For the past eighteen months, Dr J. C. has been transcribing the contents of previously-unread chest of diaries, family letters, and notebooks. Amongst these were diaries kep…
Life with Cush and Do-Dunns: The Cultural Life of an English Village in the Inter-War Years: Humour, Reminiscence and Rivalry
The analysis presented in this article relies heavily on a clear understanding of the context particularly of the geography of the region from which the data is drawn. To provide background, the discussion begins with a brief description of the Peak District of England, where the wider scene is set, then comes into closer focus, considering first one of the peakland towns, Buxton, and the villages that look to that town for goods and services, th…
Towards a Revaluation of the Legend of “Saint” William of Norwich and its Place in the Blood Libel Legend: Research Article
The legend of William of Norwich is extremely well known and often quoted in discussions of defamatory folklore. However, since I started working on it three or four years ago I have found that there are surprisingly few folkloric analyses. Leaving aside those who have attempted to believe the story and to use it as anti-Jewish propaganda, most of the respectable work has been done by historians and has tended to concentrate either on debunking t…
William of Norwich and the Expulsion of the Jews: Topics, Notes and Comments
In the last issue of Folklore I examined the legend of Saint William of Norwich and attempted to revaluate its place in the blood libel legend (Bennett 2005). In that paper I sought to tackle some of the more folkloric questions, such as, firstly, whether there is any essential difference between the primary source and the legend we now know and, if so, what its significance is, and secondly whether it is really the case that this was the first r…
History (25 works) · Art (21 works) · History (21 works) · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies (15 works) · Literature (15 works) · Sociology (14 works) · Folklore (13 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Archaeology (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works)