Patrick Mullen examines how elderly people use folk traditions to engage others and pass on their wisdom and knowledge to succeeding generations. Based on interviews with nine people in their seventies and eighties who live in rural Virginia, North Carolina, and southern Ohio, this book shows how folklore enriches people's lives. Mullen places the folklore - local legends, jokes, personal-experience narratives, family history, folk medicine, planting signs, foodways, wood carving, belief systems, customs, folk architecture - within the context of the individuals' life stories and the culture of their local communities. The analysis concentrates on recurring themes in each person's folklore and the rhetorical strategies the storytellers use to interest listeners and assure that their traditions will be passed on.

If a building could speak, what would it say? What would it sound like? Would it be worth listening to? This book treats buildings as deeply human creations - built by people for people; they come to embody the dreams, imaginings and stories that take place within them. David Littlefield and Saskia Lewis argue that buildings have voices and that it is worth listening to what they have to say. By focusing on elderly structures that are the subject of reinvention, this book examines how the buildings guide architects and artists. These reinventions, or re-imaginings, are not merely examples of straightforward conservation, nor simple exercises in contrasting old and new; they represent a more sensitive, personal approach to creative reuse. The authors' accounts of more than 20 historic buildings and their interviews with the people responsible for renewing them, demonstrate that the poetic qualities of the places we inhabit are not limited to just architectural style. In this book, the voices of an abandoned cathedral, a former brothel, a stately home and a Royal Mail sorting office reveal themselves. Listening to these voices opens up a new dimension to understanding the lives and meanings of old buildings.

The arson attacks in 2006 on a number of small Baptist churches in rural Alabama recall the rash of burnings at predominantly black houses of worship that damaged or destroyed dozens of southern churches in the mid-1990s. One of the churches struck by pro

William Faulkner recognized voice as one of the most distinctive and powerful elements in fiction when he delivered his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, describing the last sound at the end of the world as man's "puny inexhaustible voice, still talking." As a testimonial of an artist's faith in his art, the speech raised the value of voice to its highest reach for man, as "one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail." In Fiction's Inexhaustible Voice, Stephen Ross explores the nature of voice in William Faulkner's fiction by examining the various modes of speech and writing that his texts employ. Beginning with the proposition that voice is deeply involved in the experience of reading Faulkner, Ross uses theoretically grounded notions of voice to propose new ways of explaining how Faulkner's novels and stories express meaning, showing how Faulkner used the affective power of voice to induce the reader to forget the silent and originless nature of written fiction. Ross departs from previous Faulkner criticism by proceeding not text-by-text or chronologically but by construction a workable taxonomy which defines the types of voice in Faulkner's fiction: phenomenal voice, a depicted event or object within the represented fictional world; mimetic voice, the illusion that a person is speaking; psychic voice, one heard only in the mind and overheard only through fiction's omniscience; and oratorical voice, an overtly intertextual voice which derives from a discursive practice--Southern oratory--recognizable outside the boundaries of any Faulkner text and identifiable as part of Faulkner's biographical and regional heritage. In Faulkner's own experience, listening was important. As he once confided to Malcolm Cowley, "I listen to the voices, and when I put down what the voices say, it's right." In Fiction's Inexhaustible Voice, Ross conducts a careful analysis of this fundamental source of power in Faulkner's fiction, concluding that the preponderance of voice imagery, represented talking, verbalized thought, and oratorical rhetoric and posturing makes the novels and stories fundamentally vocal. They derive their energy from the play of voices on the imaginative field of written language.

Daily readings for all those suffering from the debilitating malady of sex addiction.