Fabricated World: An Interpretation of Kewa Tales

The meaning and mechanics of myth have been of constant concern in scholarship. Tales and legends challenge us to find a sense and purpose concealed in their apparent nonsense and that challenge is met in this companion volume to Kewa Tales. Describing eighty tales, the author explains how they are fabricated from recurrent narrative sequences, logical structures, and aesthetic metaphors. To do so, he draws on the formalism of Propp, the structuralism of Levi-Strauss, and writings on poetics and metaphor. But, holding tales to be mirrors or models for daily life, he also demonstrates an intimate connection between narrative structure and ethnographic settings.