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The Story of a Community

A Case Study Based on the Selected Genres of Folk Prose

Summary/Abstract: One way to analyse the functioning of a community is to study the stories generated by it. Incomprehensible phenomena and events, wars, disasters and other threats that affect a community result in the creation of informative texts that mythologise people and facts. Such texts are aimed at giving sense to the occurring events and restoring the community’s sense of security. Confronted with events of considerable importance, many different groups feel the need to express their opinions, share fears and expectations, as each crisis forces the community to express ideas about the reality and about the community itself in the form of stories. This article analyses texts of different character: integrating, informative, compensatory or cautionary, gathered by the author during her field research in Zagłębie Dąbrowskie (Eng. Dąbrowa Basin) between 1999 and 2004.

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