Charles Godfrey Leland

Charles Godfrey Leland's selected titles range across political history, memory, folklore, speculative cultural argument and comic verse. Abraham Lincoln and the Abolition of Slavery in the United States treats a national conflict through a focused historical subject. Memoirs turns attention toward recollection and self-presentation. Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune Telling collects practices and stories around belief, divination and popular tradition, while Fusang develops a disputed account of early contact through textual comparison and conjecture. Hans Breitmann's Ballads shifts register again, using a stylized comic voice and rhythmic language. The cluster is unusually broad, yet a common interest in language and cultural transmission runs through it. Leland's works repeatedly ask how stories, identities and traditions are recorded, reshaped and carried between communities.