Robert M. Farrington Bücher

Set against the backdrop of the Revolutionary War, the story follows Polly Tidd, a squatter's daughter who is kidnapped and adopted by a Lenape tribe after her brother's tragic death. Embracing her new identity as Mockwasaka, she marries Red Hawk and navigates the challenges of survival amidst drought, starvation, and the violence of Indian Wars. The narrative is enriched with Indian tales that provide both cultural depth and moments of relief amid the harrowing experiences faced by Polly and her adoptive family.

Robert M. Farrington sheds new light on nine folk-inspired rural dramas produced by three European playwrights between 1885 and 1936: Spain’s Federico Garcia Lorca, Ireland’s John Millington Synge, and Germany’s Gerhart Hauptmann. Through an analysis of the linguistic conventions of the three dramatists and by tying their plays’ language to a myth/ritual content, this book defines the works as representative of a sub-genre, that is, lyric folkdrama. A sound/meaning nexus is identified as an essential ingredient of folkdrama. To clarify this relationship between sound and meaning and to establish a theoretical basis for the linguistic analysis, the study draws from works on myth, ritual, drama, and poetic language by Aristotle, Richard Wagner, Mircea Eliade, and Northrop Frye, as well as from critical studies by the structuralists Roman Jakobson and Claude Lévi-Strauss.