Drum song performance in Accra, Ghana. Ruth Finnegan’s seminal “Oral Literature In Africa” covered stories, songs and numerous other forms of African oral culture, but the study has been out of print for many years. Credit: Emilio Labrador from Flickr.
A campaign to republish an out-of-print classic on the subject of African culture, using funds donated by academics, enthusiasts and general readers, has been launched online. It was frustrating to me that my book has largely been unavailable to readers in Africa itself. It is wonderful to think that it will now be freely read in the very continent that it discusses." - —Ruth Finnegan The campaign can be found at: https://unglue.it/work/81724/ Ruth Finnegan's seminal study, Oral Literature In Africa , was first published in 1970 and is highly rated as one of the most important books of its kind ever produced. The book traces the history of story-telling in Africa and was based on years of fieldwork which Finnegan carried out in the late 1960s, recording people from different African nations reciting stories, myths, legends and songs from their culture. One commentator has called the study "the single most authoritative work on oral literature". Another claimed the book "almost single-handedly created the field of the ethnography of language." Despite such acclaim, however, the ground-breaking work has been out of print for many years. Ironically, it is particularly hard to get hold of in Africa itself, where its original retail price was beyond the budget of most university libraries.
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