John Miles Foley offers an innovative and straightforward approach to the structural analysis of oral and oral-derived traditional texts. Professor Foley argues that to give the vast and complex body of oral "literature" its due, we must first come to terms with the endemic heterogeneity of traditional oral epics, with their individual histories, genres, and documents, as well as both the synchronic and diachronic aspects of their poetics.

Until now, the emphasis in studies of oral traditional works has been placed on addressing the correspondences among traditions—shared structures of "formula," "theme," and "story-pattern." Traditional Oral Epic explores the incongruencies among traditions and focuses on the qualities specific to certain oral and oral-derived works. It is certain to inspire further research in this field.

John Miles Foley is William H. Byler Distinguished Chair in the Humanities, University of Missouri, and founding editor of Oral Tradition.

"Foley employs linguistic, metric and thematic analysis to compare the Odyssey, Beowulf and Return Songs by three guslari from the Stolac district of central Hercegovina. He is splendidly trained for this daunting task, conversant not only in the classical and medieval Germanic tongues but in the Slavic dialects as well."—Erich Segal, Times Literary Supplement

"A masterpiece of comparative epic scholarship."—Ronelle Alexander, New York Review of Books

"We have had to wait for a true magnum opus from this brilliant heir to Parry and Lord. Now we have it in hand. . . . The book is great in its ambition to delineate the poetic foundations, the fundamental poetics of traditional Indo-European epic art, and in its accomplishment."—William Bernard McCarthy, Journal of American Folklore