A Critical Edition of the James Madison Carpenter Collection

FAIN: RQ-50428-10

American Folklore Society (Bloomington, IN 47406-7512)
Robert Y. Walser (Project Director: November 2009 to April 2014)

Preparation of three volumes of an edition of British and American folk materials in the James Madison Carpenter Collection. (36 months)

This project, being carried out by a US-UK team of scholars, is preparing 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. We are working toward the sequential publication of a ten-volume edition, arranged by genre and sub-genre, with a complementary and symbiotic relationship with the online presentation of the raw materials of the collection now being implemented by the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, the repository for the collection. The University Press of Mississippi has approved the publication of the completed critical edition in both hard copy and electronic formats.