Primitive song / C. M. Bowra.
| Author/creator | Bowra, C. M. |
| Format | Book |
| Edition | First edition. |
| Publication Info | Cleveland : World Publishing Company, [1962] |
| Description | xiv, 303 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm |
| Subjects |
| Contents | Preface -- Primitive man, ancient and modern -- Composition and performance -- Technique -- Manner and method -- Songs of action -- The natural scene -- The human cycle -- Primitive imagination -- Myth and symbol -- Some conclusions -- Abbreviations for notes. |
| Abstract | In this volume the author breaks into new territory, writing on a subject which has hardly ever been treated before and certainly never in this comprehensive way. By collecting and analyzing the songs of the most primitive peoples now alive on the earth, he shows how song, which is the earliest kind of poetry and indeed of literature, comes into existence; what its first tentative forms are, and how it gradually develops and expands. Though we can never know anything about the songs of paleolithic man, we can from his surviving counterparts learn how song comes into existence, what spirit informs it, and what part it plays in social life. The extant songs of living Stone Agers illustrate the growth of song from meaningless sounds to quite elaborate constructions, and in them we can see how poetry must have developed in the many centuries whose art of words is lost because it could not be written down. To this degree the book provides a preface to all subsequent literature, some of whose commonest devices it anticipates and explains. But the author does not confine himself to the purely formal and technical aspects of his subject. He also examines the contents of these songs and the light which they throw on primitive life. They are indeed a faithful reflection of it, and no student of literature can fail to be struck by their remarkable skill and power and truth to human nature. They reveal from inside what the struggle for existence means to such almost forgotten peoples as the Pygmies, the aboriginal Australians, the Eskimos, the Andamanese, and the Bushmen. |
| Bibliography note | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| LCCN | 62009052 |