World Classics PDF EPUB

Italian Popular Tales

First published: 1885
Pages: 408

Read online EPUB Download Save

About this book

Collected, translated, and annotated by an American folklorist working in the 1880s, this volume gathers fairy tales, animal tales, legends, ghost stories, nursery tales, and jests drawn from recent Italian and Sicilian sources. Crane leaned on the field collections of Giuseppe Pitrè of Palermo, and he kept the stories close to the way they were spoken aloud, with many reaching English readers for the first time. He arranges the material by type, pairing each tale with notes and cross-references that trace shared motifs and regional variants across Italy and the wider European tradition. Familiar shapes surface, including Cinderella variants and magical quests, alongside coarser jests and comic anecdotes. For readers drawn to oral tradition or comparative folklore, it remains a foundational English-language survey.

About the author

Thomas Frederick Crane

Thomas Frederick Crane (1844-1927) was an American scholar and educator who spent most of his career as a professor of Romance languages and literatures at Cornell University, where he also served as dean. He was among the first English-speaking academics to treat Italian oral storytelling as a serious subject of study.

Open the author page