The meaning and mechanics of myth have been of constant concern in scholarship. Tales and legends challenge us to find a sense and purpose concealed in their apparent nonsense and that challenge is met in this companion volume to Kewa Tales. Describing eighty tales, the author explains how they are fabricated from recurrent narrative sequences, logical structures, and aesthetic metaphors. To do so, he draws on the formalism of Propp, the structuralism of Levi-Strauss, and writings on poetics and metaphor. But, holding tales to be mirrors or models for daily life, he also demonstrates an intimate connection between narrative structure and ethnographic settings.

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John Leroy has a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of British Columbia. He has taught at universities in Canada and New Zealand.

Textual analysis and ethnographic content are so well blended that long voyages into Kewa culture are not intrusive, but on the contrary become part of the plot that holds us enthralled till the end of the tale. - Lisette Josephides, Man As a contribution to Melanesian ethnography and the analysis of narrative, Fabricated World deserves to become a classic and a model for elegant anthropological discourse. - Jeffrey Clark, Pacific Studies