Journals Week: Journal of American Folklore

The Journal of American Folklore is a publication of The American Folklore Society. If your primary interest is fairy tales, this is not going to be your favorite journal--the ones mentioned earlier this week have more directly fairy tale related articles on the whole. However, the journal is one of the top ones about folklore in general and merited its own post.

The Journal of American Folklore, the quarterly journal of the American Folklore Society since the Society's founding in 1888, publishes scholarly articles, essays, notes, and commentaries directed to a wide audience, as well as separate sections devoted to reviews of books, exhibitions and events, sound recordings, film and videotapes, and exhibitions and events. Its contents are not restricted to folklore in the United States; in fact, the Journal publishes materials on folklore anywhere in the world.

The contents of the Journal reflect a wide range of professional concerns and points of view. Articles present significant research findings and theoretical analyses from folklore and related fields. Essays are interpretive, speculative, or polemic. Notes are narrower in scope and focus on a single, often provocative, issue of definition, interpretation, or amplification. Commentaries briefly address topics raised in earlier articles.

Members of the American Folklore Society receive four issues of the Journal each year as one of their member benefits.

The full text of issues of the Journal from Volume 114 (2001) to the present is available online through Project MUSE. AFS members receive complimentary access to the issues of the Journal available through Project MUSE as a benefit of membership.

Here's a link to Journal of American Folklore: Recent Tables of Contents. If you browse there, you'll find very little that is fairy tale oriented, but there's plenty of interesting reading all the same.

Reminder: Please read Call for Contributions: Graduate Programs Information and send me an email if you have a contribution.

Journals Week: Journal of American Folklore

The Journal of American Folklore is a publication of The American Folklore Society. If your primary interest is fairy tales, this is not going to be your favorite journal--the ones mentioned earlier this week have more directly fairy tale related articles on the whole. However, the journal is one of the top ones about folklore in general and merited its own post.

The Journal of American Folklore, the quarterly journal of the American Folklore Society since the Society's founding in 1888, publishes scholarly articles, essays, notes, and commentaries directed to a wide audience, as well as separate sections devoted to reviews of books, exhibitions and events, sound recordings, film and videotapes, and exhibitions and events. Its contents are not restricted to folklore in the United States; in fact, the Journal publishes materials on folklore anywhere in the world.

The contents of the Journal reflect a wide range of professional concerns and points of view. Articles present significant research findings and theoretical analyses from folklore and related fields. Essays are interpretive, speculative, or polemic. Notes are narrower in scope and focus on a single, often provocative, issue of definition, interpretation, or amplification. Commentaries briefly address topics raised in earlier articles.

Members of the American Folklore Society receive four issues of the Journal each year as one of their member benefits.

The full text of issues of the Journal from Volume 114 (2001) to the present is available online through Project MUSE. AFS members receive complimentary access to the issues of the Journal available through Project MUSE as a benefit of membership.

Here's a link to Journal of American Folklore: Recent Tables of Contents. If you browse there, you'll find very little that is fairy tale oriented, but there's plenty of interesting reading all the same.

Reminder: Please read Call for Contributions: Graduate Programs Information and send me an email if you have a contribution.

Journals Week: Folklore

Folklore is the journal of The Folklore Society and has been in print under a few changing titles since 1878--Folk-lore Record and Folk-lore Journal--making it one of the oldest journals devoted to folklore and fairy tales.

Folklore is also relatively affordable for the student and armchair enthusiast since it comes with individual membership to The Folklore Society. In addition, other benefits are offered such as access through JSTOR to all Folklore issues (don't need an academic subscription!).

Here's the official list of benefits: "Benefits of Folklore Society membership include: receipt of FLS News, access to JSTOR's electronic archive of back-numbers of Folklore; information about publications and events, preferential rates for some events and publications, and access to FLS information services and library."

Here are the 2009 Membership Rates for the Folklore Society:

Ordinary membership: US$81/£45
Household membership: US$90/£50
Reduced membership (Students, Unwaged, Pensioners): US$50/£28 (proof of status required)

Aims and scope from the website:

•Folklore is one of the earliest English-language journals in the field of folkloristics, first published as Folk-Lore Record in 1878.

•Folklore publishes ethnographical and analytical essays on vernacular culture worldwide, specialising in traditional language, narrative, music, song, dance, drama, foodways, medicine, arts and crafts, and popular religion and belief. It reviews current scholarship in a wide range of adjacent disciplines including cultural studies, popular culture, cultural anthropology, ethnology and social history.

•Folklore prides itself on its special mix of ethnography, analysis and debate, formal and informal articles, reviews, review essays and bibliographies. It encompasses both North American and European approaches to the study of folklore and covers not only the materials and processes of folklore, but also the history, methods and theory of folkloristics.

•Folklore aims to be lively, informative and accessible, whilst maintaining high standards of scholarship.

Folklore has a great history of scholarship that is ongoing today. It is the journal in which many of the earliest well-known folklore and fairy tale scholars published their research and findings. It is also where they sparred over theories. You'll find Andrew Lang, Joseph Jacobs, W. R. S. Ralston, Marian Roalfe Cox and many others represented in its early issues.

All you need is internet access to read much of the scholarship published in the early years of the journal's 120 year history since many of the issues have been digitized by Google in Google Books. Unfortunately, they are not well organized and searching them is an exquisite kind of torture all too often, but they are there. I am hoping for better indexing and searching in the future as Google Books organizes itself better. Here's an example: The Folk-lore journal, Volume 7 By Folklore Society.

If you aren't interested in subscribing, individual articles from the past several years are also available for a fee through InformaWorld. If you follow that link, you can also peruse the table of contents and abstracts (not all articles have abstracts) from the last ten years of issues.

Folklore is Abstracted/Indexed in:

Anthropological Index Online; B H A Bibliography of the History of Art; Bibliography of Native North Americans; British Humanities Index; Current Abstracts; Humanities Index; Humanities International Index; International Bibliography of the Social Sciences; Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts; M L A International Bibliography (Modern Language Association of America); OCLC; Periodicals Index Online; ProQuest Central; Religion Index One: Periodicals; Thomson Reuters' Arts & Humanities Citation Index.

Reminder: Please read Call for Contributions: Graduate Programs Information and send me an email if you have a contribution.

Journals Week: Folklore

Folklore is the journal of The Folklore Society and has been in print under a few changing titles since 1878--Folk-lore Record and Folk-lore Journal--making it one of the oldest journals devoted to folklore and fairy tales.

Folklore is also relatively affordable for the student and armchair enthusiast since it comes with individual membership to The Folklore Society. In addition, other benefits are offered such as access through JSTOR to all Folklore issues (don't need an academic subscription!).

Here's the official list of benefits: "Benefits of Folklore Society membership include: receipt of FLS News, access to JSTOR's electronic archive of back-numbers of Folklore; information about publications and events, preferential rates for some events and publications, and access to FLS information services and library."

Here are the 2009 Membership Rates for the Folklore Society:

Ordinary membership: US$81/£45
Household membership: US$90/£50
Reduced membership (Students, Unwaged, Pensioners): US$50/£28 (proof of status required)

Aims and scope from the website:

•Folklore is one of the earliest English-language journals in the field of folkloristics, first published as Folk-Lore Record in 1878.

•Folklore publishes ethnographical and analytical essays on vernacular culture worldwide, specialising in traditional language, narrative, music, song, dance, drama, foodways, medicine, arts and crafts, and popular religion and belief. It reviews current scholarship in a wide range of adjacent disciplines including cultural studies, popular culture, cultural anthropology, ethnology and social history.

•Folklore prides itself on its special mix of ethnography, analysis and debate, formal and informal articles, reviews, review essays and bibliographies. It encompasses both North American and European approaches to the study of folklore and covers not only the materials and processes of folklore, but also the history, methods and theory of folkloristics.

•Folklore aims to be lively, informative and accessible, whilst maintaining high standards of scholarship.

Folklore has a great history of scholarship that is ongoing today. It is the journal in which many of the earliest well-known folklore and fairy tale scholars published their research and findings. It is also where they sparred over theories. You'll find Andrew Lang, Joseph Jacobs, W. R. S. Ralston, Marian Roalfe Cox and many others represented in its early issues.

All you need is internet access to read much of the scholarship published in the early years of the journal's 120 year history since many of the issues have been digitized by Google in Google Books. Unfortunately, they are not well organized and searching them is an exquisite kind of torture all too often, but they are there. I am hoping for better indexing and searching in the future as Google Books organizes itself better. Here's an example: The Folk-lore journal, Volume 7 By Folklore Society.

If you aren't interested in subscribing, individual articles from the past several years are also available for a fee through InformaWorld. If you follow that link, you can also peruse the table of contents and abstracts (not all articles have abstracts) from the last ten years of issues.

Folklore is Abstracted/Indexed in:

Anthropological Index Online; B H A Bibliography of the History of Art; Bibliography of Native North Americans; British Humanities Index; Current Abstracts; Humanities Index; Humanities International Index; International Bibliography of the Social Sciences; Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts; M L A International Bibliography (Modern Language Association of America); OCLC; Periodicals Index Online; ProQuest Central; Religion Index One: Periodicals; Thomson Reuters' Arts & Humanities Citation Index.

Reminder: Please read Call for Contributions: Graduate Programs Information and send me an email if you have a contribution.

Journals Week: Fabula

Fabula: Journal of Folktale Studies is somewhat less accessible for the armchair enthusiast and student when compared to Marvels & Tales because it publishes articles in several languages: German, English, and French. I read English and can read French pretty well, but my German is almost nonexistent (ironic considering my very German name, I know).

However, this is my second favorite journal for fairy tale specific studies after Marvels & Tales, thanks to content that focuses on the folklore of European and European influenced countries, my primary focus of study. They also on occasion have special issues, such as Dec 2008: Volume 49, Number 3-4, which was devoted to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Aims & Scope:

Fabula is a medium of discussion for issues of all kinds which are of interest to international folk narrative research. The journal contains eight divisions: Articles, Minor Contributions, Research Reports and Conference Reports, News, Projects and Queries, Reviews, Bibliographical Notes, and Books Received. Principal themes of the article section are the study of popular narrative traditions in their various forms (fairy tales, legends, jokes and anecdotes, exempla, fables, ballads, etc.), the interrelationship between oral and literary traditions as well as the contemporary genres. Interest focuses on Europe and overseas countries which are influenced by European civilization, but still, there is quite a number of contributions from other culture areas.

Founded by Kurt Ranke and first published in 1958, this journal has been around for several years and has printed several wonderful articles. The positive is that issues are available online for perusing. The negative is that they don't come free and are cost prohibitive to many students and armchair enthusiasts. You can access the articles online as PDFs for 24 hours for $40 each. Makes the annual subscription of about $250 for two issues sound like a bargain. (That price is approximate to the Euro conversion and the rates offered through Amazon subscriptions as of the writing of this post.)

Here is a list of the volumes with links to their tables of contents from Reference Global. So these are usually out of necessity limited to those with free access through academic institutions, something I myself don't have at this time. To help in research (or to torture those of us without further access) the site also has abstracts for the articles, available in all three languages regardless of the article's language.

The journal is also abstracted and indexed in Academic OneFile (Gale/Cengage Learning); Arts and Humanities Citation Index; and Current Contents / Arts and Humanities.

I myself wish I had the full Snow White issue as well as some articles from other volumes...

Reminder: Please read Call for Contributions: Graduate Programs Information and send me an email if you have a contribution.

Journals Week: Fabula

Fabula: Journal of Folktale Studies is somewhat less accessible for the armchair enthusiast and student when compared to Marvels & Tales because it publishes articles in several languages: German, English, and French. I read English and can read French pretty well, but my German is almost nonexistent (ironic considering my very German name, I know).

However, this is my second favorite journal for fairy tale specific studies after Marvels & Tales, thanks to content that focuses on the folklore of European and European influenced countries, my primary focus of study. They also on occasion have special issues, such as Dec 2008: Volume 49, Number 3-4, which was devoted to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Aims & Scope:

Fabula is a medium of discussion for issues of all kinds which are of interest to international folk narrative research. The journal contains eight divisions: Articles, Minor Contributions, Research Reports and Conference Reports, News, Projects and Queries, Reviews, Bibliographical Notes, and Books Received. Principal themes of the article section are the study of popular narrative traditions in their various forms (fairy tales, legends, jokes and anecdotes, exempla, fables, ballads, etc.), the interrelationship between oral and literary traditions as well as the contemporary genres. Interest focuses on Europe and overseas countries which are influenced by European civilization, but still, there is quite a number of contributions from other culture areas.

Founded by Kurt Ranke and first published in 1958, this journal has been around for several years and has printed several wonderful articles. The positive is that issues are available online for perusing. The negative is that they don't come free and are cost prohibitive to many students and armchair enthusiasts. You can access the articles online as PDFs for 24 hours for $40 each. Makes the annual subscription of about $250 for two issues sound like a bargain. (That price is approximate to the Euro conversion and the rates offered through Amazon subscriptions as of the writing of this post.)

Here is a list of the volumes with links to their tables of contents from Reference Global. So these are usually out of necessity limited to those with free access through academic institutions, something I myself don't have at this time. To help in research (or to torture those of us without further access) the site also has abstracts for the articles, available in all three languages regardless of the article's language.

The journal is also abstracted and indexed in Academic OneFile (Gale/Cengage Learning); Arts and Humanities Citation Index; and Current Contents / Arts and Humanities.

I myself wish I had the full Snow White issue as well as some articles from other volumes...

Reminder: Please read Call for Contributions: Graduate Programs Information and send me an email if you have a contribution.

Journals Week: Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies

The past several weeks I have focused on many fun things, lighthearted posts on toys, puzzles, picture books and other fairy tale related items. However, school is resuming for several of you--and I still subconsciously block the calendar in semesters myself--so I also want to include the academic side of things in this blog.

This week I plan to highlight a few print journals that focus on fairy tales and folklore, great resources for student paper writing or just general interest reading if you happen to be me.

If your primary interest is specifically fairy tales, then Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies is the most important print journal for you to know about. Here's a description and history, lifted completely from the official website for the journal.

Marvels & Tales (ISSN: 1521-4281) was founded in 1987 by Jacques Barchilon at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Originally known as Merveilles & contes, the journal expressed its role as an international forum for folktale and fairy-tale scholarship through its various aliases: Wunder & Märchen, Maravillas & Cuentos, Meraviglie & Racconti, and Marvels & Tales. In 1997, the journal moved to Wayne State University Press and took the definitive title Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies.

From the start, Marvels & Tales has served as a central forum for the multidisciplinary study of fairy tales. In its pages, contributors from around the globe have published studies, texts, and translations of fairy-tales from Europe, North America, Asia, and Africa. The Editorial Policy of Marvels & Tales encourages scholarship that introduces new areas of fairy-tale scholarship, as well as research that considers the traditional fairy-tale canon from new perspectives.

The journal's special issues have been particularly popular and have focused on topics such as "Beauty and the Beast," "The Romantic Tale," "Charles Perrault," "Marriage Tests and Marriage Quest in African Oral Literature," "The Italian Tale," and "Angela Carter and the Literary Märchen."

The editorial board for Marvels & Tales is a veritable Who's Who in academic fairy tale studies, including Jack Zipes, Marina Warner, Maria Tatar, Donald Haase and many others. (If you do not recognize these names, you should also research their works, too.)

Each issue usually includes several articles, translations of tales, and reviews of recently published literature (nonfiction). While articles about European fairy tales are represented in most issues, the scope is worldwide and offers insight into more obscure tales from other parts of the globe, too. You can see the table of contents for a recent issue here.

The journal is published twice a year and the subscription rate is very reasonable for an academic journal, especially if you are a student.

Marvels & Tales is available on Project MUSE if you are affiliated with an institution that provides access.

Reminder: Please read Call for Contributions: Graduate Programs Information and send me an email if you have a contribution.

Journals Week: Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies

The past several weeks I have focused on many fun things, lighthearted posts on toys, puzzles, picture books and other fairy tale related items. However, school is resuming for several of you--and I still subconsciously block the calendar in semesters myself--so I also want to include the academic side of things in this blog.

This week I plan to highlight a few print journals that focus on fairy tales and folklore, great resources for student paper writing or just general interest reading if you happen to be me.

If your primary interest is specifically fairy tales, then Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies is the most important print journal for you to know about. Here's a description and history, lifted completely from the official website for the journal.

Marvels & Tales (ISSN: 1521-4281) was founded in 1987 by Jacques Barchilon at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Originally known as Merveilles & contes, the journal expressed its role as an international forum for folktale and fairy-tale scholarship through its various aliases: Wunder & Märchen, Maravillas & Cuentos, Meraviglie & Racconti, and Marvels & Tales. In 1997, the journal moved to Wayne State University Press and took the definitive title Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies.

From the start, Marvels & Tales has served as a central forum for the multidisciplinary study of fairy tales. In its pages, contributors from around the globe have published studies, texts, and translations of fairy-tales from Europe, North America, Asia, and Africa. The Editorial Policy of Marvels & Tales encourages scholarship that introduces new areas of fairy-tale scholarship, as well as research that considers the traditional fairy-tale canon from new perspectives.

The journal's special issues have been particularly popular and have focused on topics such as "Beauty and the Beast," "The Romantic Tale," "Charles Perrault," "Marriage Tests and Marriage Quest in African Oral Literature," "The Italian Tale," and "Angela Carter and the Literary Märchen."

The editorial board for Marvels & Tales is a veritable Who's Who in academic fairy tale studies, including Jack Zipes, Marina Warner, Maria Tatar, Donald Haase and many others. (If you do not recognize these names, you should also research their works, too.)

Each issue usually includes several articles, translations of tales, and reviews of recently published literature (nonfiction). While articles about European fairy tales are represented in most issues, the scope is worldwide and offers insight into more obscure tales from other parts of the globe, too. You can see the table of contents for a recent issue here.

The journal is published twice a year and the subscription rate is very reasonable for an academic journal, especially if you are a student.

Marvels & Tales is available on Project MUSE if you are affiliated with an institution that provides access.

Reminder: Please read Call for Contributions: Graduate Programs Information and send me an email if you have a contribution.