A Critical Edition of the James Madison Carpenter Collection

FAIN: RQ-50212-06

American Folklore Society (Bloomington, IN 47406-7512)
Robert Y. Walser (Project Director: November 2005 to June 2009)

The second phase of a critical edition of the James Madison Carpenter Collection, including transcription of folkloric items, and work on the textual apparatus, notes, and headnotes for volumes 2-5 and 8-10. (36 months)

This project, now being carried out by a US-UK team of scholars, will prepare for publication a critical edition of the James Madison Carpenter Collection, an ethnographic corpus substantially consisting of items of traditional song and drama recorded in the field in Britain and the United States between 1927 and ca. 1943. This will form a ten-volume published work, arranged by genre and sub-genre, with an innovative and symbiotic relationship with the online presentation of the raw materials of the Collection planned by the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, the repository for the Collection. The University Press of Mississippi has expressed a strong interest in publishing the completed critical edition.