NEW paperback

Pissing in the Snow and Other Ozark Folktales [Paperback] Vance Randolph; Rayna Green and Freank A Hoffmann

Vance Randolph has long been an undeniable presence on the American folklore scholarship scene His Ozark corpus is the best known single body of regional folklore in the United States, according to Richard Dorson, director of the Folklore Institute at Indiana University And Gershon Legman, the worlds leading scholar of sexual and scatological humor, has called Randolph the greatest and most successful field collector and regional folklorist that America ever had In Legmans estimation, We have no one else like him He is a national treasure, like Mark TwainRandolphs reputation rests on the massive accumulation of folksong, folktale, and ballad materials he collected during forty years of living and working in the Ozarks Unfortunately, in the 1950s when Randolph published several collection of Ozark tales, the material in this volume was considered unprintablePissing in the Snow departs from the academic prudery that until recently has restricted the amount of bawdy folklore available for study It presents a body of material that for twenty years has circulated only in manuscript or microfilm under its present titleWhen placed in their rightful context alongside Randolphs other collections of folk material, the bawdy tales help provide evidence of what Ozark hill people think about their own lives and language As Rayna Green writes in her introduction, The entire body of material offers a picture of expressive behavior unparalleled by any other American regions or groups study Hoffmanns annotations draw parallels between the erotic narrative tradition of the Ozarks and that in other parts of the country and the world, especially Europe