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Legend-Tripping Online: Supernatural Folklore and the Search for Ong's Hat. By Michael Kinsella. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011. Pp. xiii + 211, preface, acknowledgments, notes on the appendices, appendices, notes, bibliography, index, two photographs.)
Legend-Tripping Online: Supernatural Folklore and the Search for Ong's Hat examines a series of legends disseminated online in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Michael Kinsella studies these texts, as well as how they grew in complexity as people debated their meanings on the Web boards of the early Internet. Kinsella argues that such debate constituted legend-tripping in that it compelled people to travel to an online location to investigate the truth value of a series of uncanny tales. He also argues that the resulting discussion compounded the original narrative so that the legend eventually became a legend ecology-a series of stories, and stories about stories that exceed the boundaries of a single, performed text.
Kinsella's argument requires a refined folkloristic understanding of the legend. This occasionally causes the study to stall under the weight of its own intellectual apparatus. However, his project deserves attention and admiration for grappling with the nature of the vernacular today. As Kinsella shows, much contemporary folklore is suspended in a web of orality, literacy, electronic mediation, performance, interpretation, and non-geographical sociality.
Chapters 1 through 4 interrogate the concept of legend ecology with a thorough discussion of its core genre as well as its attendant communicative processes. Framing the legend as a narrative form describing uncanny events, Kinsella situates his case study in folkloristically familiar...