Explorations In Canadian Folklore

The first comprehensive account of one of the great sagas of Arctic exploration and discovery, the Canadian Arctic Expedition of 1913–1918, led by the ethnologist/explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson and the zoologist Dr. Rudolph M. Anderson. There are details of the Expedition’s successes and tragedies, including the discovery of all but one large island north of the Canadian mainland, the accumulation of considerable scientific information and valuable collections, and the personal feud of the Expedition’s two leaders. Four appendices list Expedition personnel, fifty-three geographical sites in the Arctic named after them, locations of their diaries and collected specimens, and the thirteen government volumes arising from the Expedition.

This book is the only comprehensive bibliography of Canadian folklore in English. The 3877 different items are arranged by genres: folktales; folk music and dance; folk speech and naming; superstitions, popular beliefs, folk medicine, and the supernatural; folk life and customs; folk art and material culture; and within genres by ethnic groups: Anglophone and Celtic, Francophone, Indian and Inuit, and other cultural groups. The items include reference books, periodicals, articles, records, films, biographies of scholars and informants, and graduate theses. Each items is annotated through a coding that indicates whether it is academic or popular, its importance to the scholar, and whether it is suitable for young people. The introduction includes a brief survey of Canadian folklore studies, putting this work into academic and social perspective. The book covers all the important items and most minor items dealing with Canadian folklore published in English up to the end of 1979. It is concerned with legitimate Canadian folklore – whether transplanted from other countries and preserved here, or created here to reflect the culture of this country. It distinguishes between authentic folklore presented as collected and popular treatments in which the material has been rewritten by the authors. Intended primarily for scholars of folklore, international as well as Canadian, the book will also be of use to scholars in anthropology, cultural geography, oral history, and other branches of Canadian culture studies, as well as to librarians, teachers, and the general public.

The idea for this collection arose out of a shared sentiment that there was still something quintessentially "Western Canadian" that distinguishes and separates living in this region from all other Canadian regions. What this distinctiveness is, the editors left as open as possible in soliciting the participation of numerous disciplines and approaches to the question of "the West" and being a "Westerner." This book lays out the variety of approaches and unique research initiatives, with a novel focus on small urban centres, rural education, regional representations and identities, theatre, literature and film, visual representations, and quality of life issues, allowing for multiple lines of inquiry and discussion involving other provincial and regional experiences. The varied works within this collection cumulatively offer a unique panoramic understanding of Western themes. The eclecticism in subject matters, theory and approaches serves to enrich our understanding and appreciation of what "the West" has been and continues to be, the "Last Best West."

By investigating mutually dependent categories of identity in literature that depicts northern peoples and places, Hulan provides a descriptive account of representative genres in which the north figures as a central theme - including autobiography, adventure narrative, ethnography, fiction, poetry, and travel writing. She considers each of these diverse genres in terms of the way it explains the cultural identity of a nation formed from the settlement of immigrant peoples on the lands of dispossessed, indigenous peoples. Reading against the background of contemporary ethnographic, literary, and cultural theory, Hulan maintains that the collective Canadian identity idealized in many works representing the north does not occur naturally but is artificially constructed in terms of characteristics inflected by historically contingent ideas of gender and race, such as self-sufficiency, independence, and endurance, and that these characteristics are evoked to justify the nationhood of the Canadian state.

Canadian Folk-life and Folk-lore is an unchanged, high-quality reprint of the original edition of 1897. Hansebooks is editor of the literature on different topic areas such as research and science, travel and expeditions, cooking and nutrition, medicine, and other genres. As a publisher we focus on the preservation of historical literature. Many works of historical writers and scientists are available today as antiques only. Hansebooks newly publishes these books and contributes to the preservation of literature which has become rare and historical knowledge for the future.