Chapter 2 discusses the economic and religious importance of beached whales in northeastern Japan. Making use of folktales regarding the sea god Ebisu and domanial records on whale strandings, it is argued that stranded whales had a considerable impact on the culture and economy of northeastern communities that led to a different interpretation of whales than the communities in western Japan that engaged in active whaling. As is shown in this chapter, the reason why a non-whaling culture developed in Northeast Japan but not in western Japan is connected to how whales behave on their migration routes along the Japanese coast. Baleen whales passed through western Japanese waters in the winter months without foraging and with little disturbance to the coastal ecosystem. Therefore, whalers could hunt whales with only a small risk of damaging fisheries. However, further north, whales exhibited different behaviour as they hunted small fish for several weeks during the spring. The fishermen there had learned that having whales around benefited them as they indicated the presence of fish and could even bring the fish closer to the shore. This knowledge was thus transmitted in folktales and through material objects such as ‘whale stones’.

In this chapter I give an account of how I remember my childhood in the melodious echoes of songs my mother continues to sing in my mind, punctuating the crucial decades of the 1950s and 1960s, or 1330s and 1340s, to be more precise on our own calendar, in conjunction with historic events that stormed my homeland during this fateful time and then by extension much deeper and longer into history, culture, context – into religion, art, poetry, philosophy, and mysticism. I remember and I forget and I write and I wonder. I do all of these as an adult looking back. I detail how I wrote this book in the early hours of the morning, when most of the world around me was fast asleep, and as the sun rises and the room becomes bright, only the reflections of those memories linger about me. In the darkness of my room and the brightness of the laptop screen on which I wrote, I was reassured of a window that has opened into the womb into which I was conceived.

Chapter 26 aims to rationalize and discuss how a genre-based approach is best applied as a guiding principle for different levels of the Korean language curricula. The chapter showcases the application of the genre-based approach to intermediate level language teaching using a story genre, that is, folktales. After presenting the theoretical basis for the genre-based approach in foreign language education, the chapter highlights the empirically attested benefits of applying this framework. It then discusses issues pertaining to developing such courses – practical issues to consider, activities and tasks to be used in classroom instructions with examples, assessing learning outcomes, and so on. The proposal made in this chapter is an attempt to expand the horizon beyond what most previous research on this topic has achieved and to maximize the benefits of the genre-based curriculum in a lower level course with the popular genre of folktales.

The chapter reconstructs the biographical and political background to the most widely known project of the brothers Grimm, the Children’s and Household Tales. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm began the collection when they were in their twenties and Jacob worked as a civil servant in Kassel, partly under French rule. By surveying the larger repertoire of genres preferred by leading nationalists reacting to Napoleon’s occupation, such as propagandistic pamphlets and war songs but also collections of folk narratives, the chapter uncovers the specific ideological function of the folktale collection as literary proof of cultural nationhood. Influenced by the volatile geopolitical situation during the Napoleonic wars, the brothers believed that the state should coincide with the German nation as defined by linguistic and cultural criteria, and they thought that the independent existence of this cultural unit was authentically demonstrated by collections of materials such as their folktales. Nationalism emerged as an ideology crucially dependent on scholarly documentation, which the brothers thought they could supply.

The chapter looks at Wilhelm Grimm’s early conception of the philologist as a redeemer of the nation. Grimm was decisively influenced by the university teacher and mentor of both brothers, the law professor Friedrich Carl von Savigny, who was known for his belief that the historicist legal scholar served as the primary custodian of the national legal corpus. Following Savigny’s example, Wilhelm Grimm argued that the philologist must strive to retrieve, clarify, disseminate, and thereby guard the nation’s folk culture. The nation formed the only viable basis for rule, but the nation’s history was not generally known; rather, it had to be explored, preserved, and transmitted by publicly oriented scholarship. In this sense, there was a vital philological dimension to the modern conception of political legitimacy, and the philologist had to assume the important task of reconstructing and reintroducing politically crucial cultural materials for the contemporary world. Inspired by the folktales’ own imagery of resurrection and rejuvenation, Wilhelm Grimm even pictured the philologist as able to reawaken the nation from its slumber.

Magical realism, primitivism and ethnography are historically and theoretically interrelated discourses. Mavellous folk and fairy tales, legends and myths are remote origins that received renewed attention with the rise of the avant-grade and American archaeology in the early twentieth century. In the Hispanic tradition, antecedents date back to medieval lore, which inspired chivalric and pastoral romances as well as the picaresque novel, finding a seminal synthesis in Don Quixote. In the New World, the Chronicles of the Indies, with their outlandish tales of discovery, drew not only from medieval and early Renaissance worldviews, but also from marvellous sources as varied as John Mandeville, Marco Polo, Ptolemy, Pliny and the Bible. Latin American authors have consistently cited these sources of magical realism, yet they looked at them through the prism of the avant-garde. Alejo Carpentier conceived of his seminal concept of lo real maravilloso americano as an answer to the Surrealists’ artificial merveilleux. Carpentier and Miguel Ángel Asturias, with his Surrealist view of the ancient Maya, coincided in late 1920s Paris with avant-garde primitivism and another magic realist, Venezuelan Arturo Uslar-Pietri, a close associate of Massimo Bontempelli, whose version of magical realism became their true spark, whereas Franz Roh’s influence in Latin America was negligible. Later authors like Juan Rulfo and Gabriel García Márquez significantly developed magical realist narratology, consolidating the Latin American trend and making it indispensable for understanding its international expansion based on the allegorical reinterpretation, and subversion, of dominant history – a crucial postcolonial endeavour for cultures around the world.