The Folkloresque: Reframing Folklore in a Popular Culture World ed. by Michael Dylan Foster, Jeffrey A. Tolbert (review)

Michael Dylan Foster and Jeffrey A. Tolbert have taken on the task of compiling a volume of essays that speaks to a timely question in folklore studies: How can we speak about the relationship between folklore and popular culture? For a long time in folklore studies, popular culture was understood, in a sense, to be the antithesis of folklore. Popular culture is participated in and communicated by the masses, whereas folklore is often understood as belonging to a specific culture and communicated informally. However, as Foster and Tolbert claim, the connections between folklore and popular culture have long been present, yet there has been uncertainty about how to speak of material that is not folklore per se but still exudes a folkloric feel. Foster and Tolbert have set out to fill this much needed void in folklore vocabulary by positing the term folkloresque as a way to interpret such works.

The idea of the folkloresque developed when Foster was invited to give a lecture on the 2001 Japanese animated film Spirited Way. Foster asserts that the film was resonant with “a folklore-like familiarity and seemed weighty because of folkloric roots, but at the same time it was not beholden to any single tradition” (3). Foster’s response raises the question of what it means when contemporary texts such as films, books, or video games seem more authentic and therefore more appealing as a result of this folkloric familiarity, even though they are not bound to a specific or even identifiable tradition. It is these timely and significant concerns that the essays in this volume address; scholars are encouraged to approach those areas, which have long been avoided, where tradition meets innovation and where folklore and popular culture can no longer be seen as antithetical but rather as interdependent.

The book is divided into three parts—“Integration,” “Portrayal,” and “ Parody”—each of which begins with a brief introduction by Tolbert and follows with three to four essays of varying subject matter. The first part, “ Integration,” includes essays that speak to the way folkloric material has been integrated into works of popular culture; examples range from Paul Manning’s “Pixies’ Progress: How the Pixie Became Part of the Nineteenth-Century Fairy Mythology,” which considers the popularization of the pixie through the literary writings of Anna Eliza Bray, to Daniel Peretti’s “Comics as Folklore,” which examines the folkloresque nature of Superman. The second part, “Portrayal,” is concerned with how folklore (and folklorists) are portrayed in popular culture, as in the essay “A Deadly Discipline: Folklore, Folklorists, and the Occult in Fatal Frame” by Tolbert, in which he draws close attention to the way the folklorist character in the horror video game series Fatal Frame is both a help and a danger to the player. The final part is concerned with folkloresque parody, which requires, as parody does, an awareness of what is being imitated or referenced—otherwise comprehension is lost. The essays in this part vary from Trevor J. Blank’s “Giving the ‘Big Ten’ a Whole New Meaning: Tasteless Humor and the Response to the Penn State Sexual Abuse Scandal,” which studies parodic jokes as metacommentary, to Bill Ellis’s “The Fairy-Telling Craft of Princess Tutu: Metacommentary and the Folkloresque,” which reflects on what happens when characters become aware of the conventions of storytelling.

Although this is not a comprehensive list of the essays included in the volume, it is representative of the subject matter covered, primarily books and media. Some folklore enthusiasts might be hesitant about entering the folkloresque territory, so for those interested in more traditional folklore, such as fairy tales and folk narratives, there are essays that offer new insights into old material. For example, Carlea Holl-Jensen and Tolbert, in their essay “‘New-Minted from the Brothers Grimm’: Folklore’s Purpose and the Folkloresque in The Tales of Beedle the Bard,” consider how J. K...