Oral Tradition Volume 1, Number 1January 1986
About the Authors
Burton Raffel
Burton Raffel is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Arts and Humanities, University of Louisiana at Lafayette. His most recent books are a fully annotated edition of Hamlet (2003), the first in a series of such editions from Yale University Press, and a new translation of Stendahl’s The Red and the Black (2003).
Robert Culley
Robert Culley’s interest in oral tradition and Biblical studies began with his dissertation, later published as Oral Formulaic Language in the Biblical Psalms (1967). In addition to the general problem of the applicability of this approach to the Bible, he has touched on similar areas in Studies in the Structure of Hebrew Narrative (1976) and plans further commentary in a Proppian study of narrative action now underway. He is presently Professor of Religious Studies at McGill University.
Frederick Turner
Frederick Turner (University of Texas, Dallas), former editor of the Kenyon Review, is at home in anthropology and modern science as well as literary studies. He also is a wellpublished poet, whose book-length epic poem The New World appeared in 1985. His essays range from an examination of reflexivity in Thoreau to a study of space and time in Chinese verse, and on to the collection entitled Natural Classicism (1985).
Roderick Beaton
Roderick Beaton (King’s College London) has carried on fieldwork on Greek oral poetry in many parts of Greece and Cyprus and is the author of Folk Poetry of Modern Greece (1980). He has researched and published extensively on Greek literature dating from the twelfth century to the present and on modern Greek folk music. His current research project is a book entitled The Medieval Greek Romance.
Eric A. Havelock
In 1963 Eric Havelock’s landmark book Preface to Plato revolutionized the way we read both Homer and other ancient Greek literature by making the case for the “oral encyclopedia” of cultural attitudes, values, and beliefs that was “published” in oral performance. A collection of his seminal writings, The Literate Revolution in Greece and Its Cultural Consequences (1982), has since appeared, as has a fascinating study of the Presocratics (1983). He is Sterling Professor of Classics (Emeritus) at Yale University.
