Basic concepts of folklore

In the volume's more than a thousand longer and shorter entries, the reader will find the most important concepts and phenomena of folkloristics and certain related sciences, comparative literature, ethnography, anthropology, poetics and aesthetics, cultural history, cultural theory, and semiotics, systematized and interconnected. (At the same time, he will not encounter explanations of the basic concepts of research related to folk art, folk dance, and folk music.) The definitions of the concepts discussed and their systematization have been prepared with particular care. They provide not only a Hungarian but also an international overview, and this is supplemented by a rich bibliography. A special advantage of the volume is that it reflects the understanding and vocabulary of a single author, and thus forms a coherent whole. Thanks to this, the present work can be considered an independent phenomenon among the large number of Hungarian lexicons published recently. With the help of its rich reference system, the reader can find information in many directions, for example, he can notice the diversity and almost inexhaustible richness of folklore in the broad sense. That is why we recommend that the reader not only familiarize himself with a single heading, but also go beyond these and read a larger number of interesting overviews on various topics. The introduction to the volume introduces the reader to the strange world of creating lexicons and their headings.