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Niles, John D.: Homo Narrans. The Poetics and Anthropology of Oral Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 1999. ix, 280 p.
Ever since 1965, when the German folklorist Kurt Ranke first introduced into the scholarship devoted to traditional narrative the notion of 'homo narrans', the 'storytelling human being', this terminological and conceptual sibling to homo sapiens, homo laborans, and homo ludens has hardly ever been absent from the minds of those who think and write about stories and those who tell them in the folk-cultural register. The 'storyteller' has therefore been a central figure in several books and essays - by authors who have moved beyond ana- lyses of the product - the tale - to investigations of the creative processes and occasions from which this product emerges, in the performances of their indi- vidual tellers as part of the productive interplay between creativity and tradi- tion. Consequently, it is not surprising that two books published in the same year, 1999, bear the title Homo Narrans, one an anthology of essays presented to the German folk-narrative scholar Siegfried Neumann, the other a penetrat- ing study by the American Anglo-Saxonist and folklorist John D. Niles. It is the second of these that is the subject of this review.
An important pointer to what Niles' book is ultimately about is to be found in the list of illustrations which precedes the actual text, and of course in the illustrations themselves,...