Sunday, August 14, 2022

About This Site

This is a website for my summer 2019 project about the Brer Rabbit stories collected by Joel Chandler Harris. I have edited all 183 of the stories to remove the eye-dialect and to also remove the Uncle-Remus framing. You can browse the stories using this index, which contains links to the each story here. You can also browse the stories at the Diigo Library; those Diigo links lead to the edited versions.

In addition, I've been harvesting images from public domain sources: illustrated editions at Flickr.

Random Illustration



OVERVIEW

Frame and Dialect
One of the biggest barriers to reading and enjoying the Brer Rabbit stories is the "eye-dialect" which Harris used when he published the tales, along with the minstrelesque use of Uncle Remus to frame the stories. At this site I have removed the Uncle Remus frame and the eye-dialect from all the stories; each story also contains a link to the original book online so that you can compare the two versions.


Diigo
I've also built a Diigo Library for this project and my other story-collecting work; you can see that library here: Diigo Tales. This summer, I am focusing on African American, African, Native American, and other relevant stories to establish a comparative context for the Brer Rabbit tales. Each item in the Library links to an online version of the story for you to read at a full-text online source for public domain books such as Hathi Trust or Internet Archive or at my one of my own websites, such as this blog. In addition, the stories are tagged to allow for filtering and searching. Click on any tag to see how that works. For example this link shows you the stories from Jones's Georgia Coast stories. You can also do Boolean searches with multiple tags, so here are all the stories from Jones's book that have summaries. Enjoy browsing! There are over 8000 tales in there so far, and my goal is to reach 10,000 by the end of the summer. Let there be stories! And summaries of stories to help people find what they are looking for.


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