Traditional Oral Epic: The Odyssey, Beowulf, and the Serbo-Croation Return Song

John Miles Foley offers an innovative and straightforward approach to the structural analysis of oral and oral-derived traditional texts. Professor Foley argues that to give the vast and complex body of oral "literature" its due, we must first come to terms with the endemic heterogeneity of traditional oral epics, with their individual histories, genres, and documents, as well as both the synchronic and diachronic aspects of their poetics.

Until now, the emphasis in studies of oral tradition...