It's been really useful, even if I just cannot endorse the whole tale-type/motif project, especially for a corpus like this. But I learned a lot, and somebody had to do this work... which gives me the luxury of asking, what next? Baer established a preponderance of African types and motifs in the stories that Harris published.
Now I can focus on what seems important to me: using that information to put the stories in a context so that we can see them more clearly side by side with other stories, and that would be other African American stories, stories from the Caribbean, plus stories from Africa, along with stories from Europe and from India as relevant. That's the research I will get to do in the coming year!
Baer's book culminates with the kind of table I've photographed below; that's her end product. My end product will be something very different: a book of stories. The organization of those stories will be indebted to the kind of work that she has done, along with Klipple, Flowers, Bascom, etc. ... but it will take the form of stories, not tables. :-)
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