Jan Harold Brunvand

I normally love Brunvand's books - they're such a fascinating examination of how folklorists work and what folklore does - but I have to admit that I soured on this book entirely on account of a paragraph in the "sex legends" chapter that dismisses date rape as an urban legend, because apparently no one he talked to admitted to experiencing it themselves. (I CAN'T IMAGINE WHY.)

This was one of three textbooks I'm reading in a graduate intro to folklore course, and it's by far the least favorite of the books among all the students in the class. The information is basic and presented dryly, primarily description of different types of folklore with some examples. There's little sense for the vitality of any of these traditions. We've all been bored and questioned why the professor didn't just stick with the other two main texts, Oring's anthology and Toelken's show more "Dynamics."

The last revision in the 1990s did not revise enough; the chapter on "superstitions" in particular is egregiously slanted to a scientific Western perspective, but there are other areas in which Brunvand's writing still smells of old scholarly romanticism for "dying" ways and "primitive" cultures. The coverage of customary and material traditions is unsatisfyingly minimal, selective, and descriptive rather than analytic. And, as a personal affront, the chapter on folk dance completely ignores (and denies the existence of some) other American folk dance traditions besides square dancing. show less

A great basic collection of all the "canonical" urban legends, by the man who created - or at least publicized - the modern concept of the urban legend. While pretty much everything here is up on the website (or in his other books), it's still worth getting if you prefer having a paper copy.

Though it would have been a very different book if written a few years later: while it does post-date many of the changes in the *dispersion* of urban legends that the Internet and other modern show more information technology has created, and effectively discusses those changes, it is not quite up to the mark in the changes in *research* that have occurred - there are quite a few legends in here, for example, that he concludes are purely apocryphal, that a simple google search will now bring up primary audiovisual sources for. show less

This book is so exactly what I want out of a study of urban legends that I kind of think I read it at some point in the past and have since been comparing all other urban legend books to it. Brunvand offers a selection of contemporary (for 1981) urban legends and a more-than-superficial analysis of them; I'll be keeping an eye out for his other books (and for someone to write something similar about Slenderman).