We all know those stories that are too bizarre to be true--roasted babies, vanishing hitchhikers, scuba divers in trees--but have you heard about the ice-man or the bullet baby? Do you know the urban legends from Holland, Scotland, France, or Australia? Or the connection between urban legends and folk narrative, xenophobia, and the Child ballads? You will, once you read Encyclopedia of Urban Legends, the definitive word on the subject from the dean of urban-legend studies, Jan Harold Brunvand. This exhaustive and compulsively readable reference work offers alphabetical entries on every aspect of the subject, including descriptions of hundreds of individual legends and their variations, legend themes, and scholarly approaches to the genre. The thorough coverage of urban legends of the United States, Canada, and other English-speaking countries is enhanced by entries for all countries in which published urban legend collections are presently available: hitchhikers vanish all over the world.
Urban legends are a specimen of modern folk narrative, so this encyclopedia contains entries on how to collect, classify, and analyze texts and performances. Other entries discuss the relationship of urban legends to literature, film, comic books, music, and many other areas of popular culture.
All entries are cross-referenced and feature brief bibliographies. The introduction defines