Folklore Forum

Huang Sui-chi. Essentials of Neo-Confucianism: Eight Major Philosophers of the Song and Ming Periods. London: Greenwood, 1999. Pp. 280, glossary, bibliography, index.

Lanlan (Diane) Kuang
Indiana University

Huang Sui-chi’s book on Chinese Neo-Confucianism is an impressive and well-organized work. Prior to her presentation of the eight major philosophers: Zhou Dun-yi 周敦頤 (1017-1073), Shao Yong 邵雍 (1011-1077), Zhang Zai 张载 (1020-1077), Cheng Hao 程顥 (1032-1085), Cheng Yi 程頤 (1033-1107), Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130-1200), Lu Xiang-shan 陸九淵 (1139-1193), and Wang Yang-ming 王阳明 (1472-1529), Huang lays out the historical context in which Neo-Confucianism arose and the sociopolitical influences on its formation. Most importantly, Huang points out the main differences between Confucianism and Neo-Confucianism, thus her reader can trace and compare the two schools of thought. (more…)

Jack Zipes. Hans Christian Andersen: The Misunderstood Storyteller. New York: Routledge, 2005. Pp. xvii + 171, bibliography, film bibliography, index.

Steve Stanzak
Indiana University

As the subtitle suggests, this work by distinguished fairy tale scholar Jack Zipes endeavors to dispel the romanticized image of Andersen in popular culture by offering a more accurate and nuanced examination of the Danish storyteller. Although published during the bicentennial commemoration event of Andersen’s birth (the book carries the event’s logo), Zipes nevertheless avoids celebrating Andersen. Instead, Zipes aims to reevaluate the life and works of the prolific storyteller so that he may be taken as a serious literary figure. (more…)

Laura Gonzenbach. The Robber with a Witch’s Head: More Stories from the Great Treasury of Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales. Trans. Jack Zipes. New York: Routledge, 2004. Pp. xxxii+230. Illus., notes, bibliography.

The Robber with a Witch’s Head is the second volume of Jack Zipes’s translation of Laura Gonzenbach’s nineteenth-century collection of Sicilian folk narrative. While this volume completes the translation of Gonzenbach’s work, the introduction to the volume is a slight revision of the introduction to the first volume, and thus it could easily stand alone as a translation of Italian folk narrative. (more…)

Katherine Borland. Unmasking Class, Gender, and Sexuality in Nicaraguan Festival. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006. Pp. 184, notes, references, index. ISBN:0-8165-2511-0, $45.00 cloth.

Elizabeth A. Burbach
Indiana University

Nicaragua has experienced an incredibly difficult century of supposed independence, a century wherein a variety of internal and external forces to Nicaragua sought and seeks to define and redefine the economic, political, social, and cultural landscape, a situation not unfamiliar to Latin America as a whole. Katherine Borland, in Unmasking Class, Gender, and Sexuality in Nicaraguan Festival, has crafted an illuminating and thoughtful ethnographic-historical analysis of Nicaraguan festival as one arena wherein this struggle for power is played out. An Associate Professor of Comparative Studies in the Humanities at The Ohio State University at Newark, Borland illustrates Nicaraguan festival as a complex locus for the construction, assertion, and negotiation of individual, local, and national identities. (more…)