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Hill, Donald R. : Caribbean Folklore: A Handbook. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2007. 201 pp.
This is the thirteenth volume in Greenwood's Folklore Handbooks series. Intended for high school students and lower level college students, as well as the general reader, the contents follow a pattern set in the first volume; namely, five chapters, with accompanying glossary, bibliography, web resources, and an index.
Hill, one of the senior scholars of Caribbean expressive culture, admits in his Preface that it is a daunting task to even begin to reduce the diversity found in the Caribbean to a book of approximately two hundred pages. The immense diversity and complexity of the region is why scholars have tended to focus on one specific island or one specific genre for research purposes. Hence, his study, like so many others in the series, intends to fill this gap by providing a roadmap or guide, not an encyclopedic listing of materials. As such, it is introductory and descriptive in nature, not comprehensive. Each chapter is thus intended to stand independently of the others, but taken together they should provide a general overview to the nonspecialist.
The first chapter provides the author's rationale for including the...