Traditional Storytelling Today: An International Sourcebook (review)

Traditional Storytelling Today: An International Sourcebook.Edited by Margaret Read MacDonald. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1999. xv + 627 pp.

This book is a mammoth undertaking, and like all mammoths, it is large and clumsy but admirable. Margaret Read MacDonald is a renowned storyteller, critic, editor of anthologies, and librarian; she has undoubtedly made major contributions to the renascence of storytelling in the United States. The present volume is an endeavor to depict the present state of traditional storytelling throughout the world, and MacDonald has gathered together one hundred articles, long and short, written by expert critics, scholars, and practitioners of storytelling that cover an unusually wide array of topics and are always informative, even when they are weak in substance.

The major portion of the book (ninety-one essays) is divided according to geographical region: Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, Australia and the Pacific, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, Native America, North America, and South America. The final nine articles deal ostensibly with theory but they are more historical analytical accounts than anything else and explore such topics as: children's telling of ghost stories (Sylvia Grider), organizational storytelling (Richard Raspa), the role of traditional stories in language teaching and learning (Martha Bean), the storytelling revival (Joseph Sobol), pre-adolescent girls' storytelling (Elizabeth Tucker), an analysis of five interviews with story listeners to determine how they perceive the listening experience (Brian Sturm), urban legends (Jan Harold Brunvand), a case analysis of an etic/emic storytelling event (Wendy Welch), and the nature of women's storytelling (Linda Dégh). Most of these fine essays focus on issues and developments in the United States and the West. The length of the articles throughout the volume varies from two to eleven pages, and they are all introduced by a brief description of the contents and conclude with a helpful bibliography of suggested reading.

Given the comprehensive scope of the book, it is difficult to comment on all the essays, especially since I am unfamiliar with many of the storytelling traditions in the numerous countries represented in this volume. Therefore, I should like to examine a few articles about storytelling in countries with which I am familiar and with a couple of regions that are unfamiliar to give a general sample of the quality of the essays.

There are two articles on storytelling in Germany, Sabine Wienker-Piepho's "Märchen 2000: Taking Care of the Fairy Tale in Germany," and Siegfried Neumann's "Traditional Storytelling Today in the Ast of Northern Germany," which complement each other. Wienker-Piepho's essay is exemplary, and I wish most of the articles in Traditional Storytelling Today had been conceived and developed like hers. She begins by discussing the postwar situation and the notion of pflegen or taking care of the fairy tale as an important cultural tradition. Then she discusses the split between the academic and popular reception of the tales in Germany. Her major focus is on the historical development of the influential association, the Europäische Märchengesellschaft (The European Fairy Tale Society), and the other groups that are linked to it and how the renewal of storytelling in Germany compares with other movements in the West. Throughout her article she is informative and critical of the commercial and pseudoscientific uses of storytelling, and she celebrates the multiplicity of approaches to the tales. Neumann's piece is much more specific and just as enlightening as Wienker-Piepho's essay. A distinguished folklorist from the former East Germany, he explores in detail how story traditions in Mecklenburg and West Pomerania have been conserved through a mix of oral storytelling and the mass media.

In contrast to the two articles on Germany, Veronika Görög-Karady's essay on "New Storytellers in France" is disappointing. She makes one interesting point--that contemporary storytelling in France does not derive directly from traditional oral culture--but her three-page article is so skimpy and so general that it is impossible...