Ruth Finnegan

Born in Northern Ireland in 1933, Ruth Finnegan studied classics at Oxford, followed by social anthropology, then fieldwork and university teaching in Africa. In 1969 she joined the Open University where she is now Emeritus Professor. Her books include Oral Literature in Africa (1970), Oral Poetry (1977/1992), Literacy and Orality (1988), Oral Traditions and the Verbal Arts (1992), South Pacific Oral Traditions (joint ed., 1995), Communicating (2002), and The Oral and Beyond: Doing Things with Words in Africa (2007).

Articles by Ruth Finnegan

Introduction: or, Why the Comparativist Should Take Account of the South Pacific

Volume 5, Issue 2-3 (May, 1990)

Tradition, But What Tradition and For Whom?

Volume 6, Issue 1 (January, 1991)

“Oral Tradition”: Weasel Words or Transdisciplinary Door to Multiplexity?

Volume 18, Issue 1 (March, 2003)

The How of Literature

Volume 20, Issue 2 (October, 2005)

Response from an Africanist Scholar

Volume 25, Issue 1 (March, 2010)
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