Bibliographic record
Abstract
This book offers a comprehensive introduction to the vast field of 'oral poetry,' encompassing everything from American folksongs, contemporary pop songs, and Inuit lyrics, to the heroic epics of Homer, biblical psalms, and epic traditions in Asia and the Pacific. Taking a broad comparative approach, it explores oral poetry across Africa, Asia, Oceania, Europe, and the Americas. Drawing on global research, Ruth Finnegan, the author of the seminal Oral Literature in Africa, sheds light on key debates such as the nature of oral tradition, the relationship between poetry and society, the differences between oral and written forms, and the role of poets in predominantly non-literate contexts. Written from a primarily anthropological and literary perspective, this study contributes to the socio-cultural aspects of verbal art while also engaging with the literary dimensions of poetry which happens at any given moment to be unwritten. Finnegan's clear, non-technical language and extensive use of translated examples make this work accessible to a wide audience, appealing not only to sociologists and anthropologists but also to those with an interest in poetry, in comparative literature, and in global folk traditions. The re-issue of this classic study is now augmented by further illustrations and a newly written Introduction and Conclusion, situating it in the context of the contemporary study of literature.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.882 | 0.065 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".