Some years ago, in a wry mood, a prominent American folklorist described folklore as “a bastard field that anthropology begot upon English” (Coffin 1968:v). This cute image has a certain rhetorical zip to it, but it is slanderously misleading as intellectual history. In truth, modern folklore has a fully honorable heritage; the seminal figure was that great precursor of romantic nationalism, Johann Gottfried von Herder, in whose vision the oral literature of a people was both the highest and truest expression of its authentic national culture and the appropriate foundation of its national literature. There is an element of accuracy in the description, however, insofar as it suggests that academic compartmentalization and the stress on disciplinary integrity it engenders have compromised the legitimacy of folklore in some quarters, impeding its own pursuit of disciplinary autonomy within the academy. Scholars in anthropology and literature departments have generally remained willing to accord oral literature some place – however limited – within their own disciplinary purviews, but subject always to current fashions of intellectual concern and respectability.

My own conviction is that much has been lost as the rise of academic differentiation and its concomitant division of intellectual labor have fragmented the unified vision of literature as cultural production that was folklore's birthright.