The Irish Storyteller

Dublin: Four Courts, 2001. Hardcover. VG/VG (ex-library with labels and stamps on spine, block, inside front and rear covers and title page verso. Light shelfwear but pages are very clean and clear. Binding is tight.). Black cloth boards with gilt spine lettering; bw illustrated dj, mylar cover; 633 pp. "This book studies images of the Irish traditional storyteller offered at different periods, from several viewpoints and for various purposes. This book explores the testimony of early antiquarians, accounts of meetings with storyetellers by eighteenth or nineteenth century travellers, representations of acts of elite storytelling in ancient Iriish literature or of popular ones in oral tradition itself and in fiction in English." dj. Contents include: 1. 'Tell us a story' -- 2. Colloquies of the ancients, and modern views or controversies -- 3. Powerful and dangerous or humble and innocent : storytellers as seen by Gaels and Galls -- 4. Echoes of past virtues, heard or imagined by antiquaries, surveyors and philologists -- 5. Travellers and talkative guides -- 6. Protofolklorists and imitators, nationalists and peasants, in the first half of the nineteenth century -- 7. Nineteenth-century Irish novelists and traditional storytelling -- 8. Irish country life, folklore and nationalism in the second half of the nineteenth century -- 9. Noble peasants and mythical islanders, or 'tons of useless folklore'? -- 10. Folklorists meet storytellers or those who remember them -- 11. Irish traditional storytelling in the twentieth century : how much do we know -- 12. Stories about storytelling, storytellers in stories -- 13. 'That was all true enough' -- 14. 'Now to conclude and finish'.