Cunnie Rabbit, Mr. Spider and the Other Beef: West African Folk Tales

Ward, Henry W.Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.8
Word count
302K words
Chapters
31

Tags

English Originals Folk Literature Animal FableShort StoriesAfrican FolktalesOral TraditionExotic CultureFolk CustomsFolk LegendYouth Reading

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Cunnie Rabbit, Mr. Spider and the Other Beef: West African Folk Tales by Cronise et al.Author: Ward, Henry W.,Language: English, Class: GR: Geography, Anthropology, Recreation: Folklore, Release Date: Apr 30, 2015

Editor's review

This is a collection of West African folk tales centered on characters such as the rabbit and the spider, belonging to the public-domain literature of folklore. Its value lies in preserving the character genealogy and storytelling style of oral narrative; figures like the rabbit and the spider recur across cultures in folk tales, and readers can observe how West African stories organize plots and assign character functions. The book contains multiple tales and is suitable as supplementary reading in folklore, anthropology, or comparative literature, as well as a source for parents and storytellers. Readers need not seek the modern compactness of plot; a slower pace is better, attending to repetitive phrasing, dialogue-driven progression, and fixed pairings of character traits. As a public-domain e-book, it is convenient for locating specific motifs and suited to classroom selections and story-adaptation exercises.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Not a good fit for

Reading tips

  1. Read a few tales first to feel the storytelling rhythm, then return to sort out the functional differences among characters such as the rabbit and the spider
  2. Place tales sharing the same motif side by side to compare patterns of repetition and variation
  3. Read a tale aloud before telling it to children, marking passages suited to pauses and interaction
  4. When citing for research, note characters and motifs by tale for easy comparison with stories from other cultures

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31

FAQ

What age of child are these stories suitable for? The stories come from oral tradition; the plots are straightforward, but some content carries the roughness of folk narrative and was not adapted specifically for young children. Parents should browse first and choose tales with simple character relations and clear endings, skipping or adapting unsuitable content rather than reading every tale as is.
What is the relationship between the rabbit and the spider in the book? They are recurring characters, often advancing the plot through cleverness or cunning. Their specific relationship varies by tale: in some they are opponents, in others each appears independently. While reading, note each character's habitual tactics and outcomes, which helps understand the division of roles in West African stories.
How does this book differ from an ordinary fairy-tale collection? It is closer to recorded oral folk tales, preserving repetition, dialogue, and stock characters from telling rather than fairy tales polished by modern editors. It may read less smoothly than a fairy-tale collection, but it shows more directly what stories look like as they pass from mouth to ear, suited to reading with a research or comparative eye.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Ward, Henry W. Author

Henry W. Ward is an author about whom little public information is available: his nationality, dates of birth and death, and educational background are not recorded in the existing material, and only one of his works is held in the collection. He is known to readers mainly as the compiler of a collection of West African folk tales. The book, titled Cunnie Rabbit, Mr. Spider and the Other Beef: West African Folk Tales, is the result of collecting and arranging folklore, focusing on animal stories and narrative wisdom from West African oral traditions. Works of this kind usually retell or adapt local tales in English, preserving the humor, repetition, and personification characteristic of oral literature, and offering English-language readers a window into West African folk culture. Given the lack of further biographical material, his style and influence can only be understood through this single work, which reflects a recorder's effort to organize a foreign narrative tradition and thus has some reference value for folklore studies and comparative literature.