"We Spend Our Years as a Tale that is Told": Oral Historical Narrative in a South African Chiefdom

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Pearson Education, 1994 - Education - 328 pages
Taking its title from the Book of Psalms, this book investigates three related areas: oral storytelling, literacy and historical narrative. The author takes gender to be the decisive division in the storytelling genre, whereby men tend to tell "true" historical stories while women specialize in fictional narratives. With originality and humor, Isabel Hofmeyr examines how the male and female genres interact and plots the changes that have occurred in the oral history tradition.

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Contents

Introduction
1
Stories go Hand in Glove with Building a Man and a Woman
25
Jonah and the Swallowing Monster
41
Copyright

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