Legend and Belief

Linda Dégh's scholarship on legend is familiar to folklorists through her illustrious series of publications, especially the 1973-1983 articles written with her late husband, Andrew Vázsonyi, on legend and belief, the memorate, the multiconduit hypothesis, truth in modern legends, and ostensive action. Underpinning all is a conviction that "the self-collected item is the crucial first step toward scholarly interpretation" (p. 25). On the first page of this new book Dégh introduces the metaphor of legend telling as a lawsuit: "Like the plaintiff and the defendant in a legal process, advocates of belief and non-belief face each other in the course of the legend process." The metaphor continues with references to disputability, rules of law, and testimony (pp. 3-4), and this massive review of legend transmission and scholarship develops this framing concept throughout her book. In chapter 2, Dégh's working definition concludes with, "The legend is a legend once it entertains debate about belief" (p. 97). This view of legend dialectics is argued by means of reviews of previous scholarship, details from the author's fieldwork, and texts from interviews, questionnaires, correspondence, student papers, newspaper articles and letters to editors, advice and commentary columns, tabloid stories, radio and television talk shows, films, advertising, cartoons and comic strips, Internet texts, and even the claims of professional "psychics" and the actions of members of religious cults

Art · Folklore · Legend · Linguistics · Literature · Metaphor · Political science · Scholarship · Sociology · Digital Humanities and Scholarship · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies

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