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Cinderella in America: A Book of Folk and Fairy Tales.

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Cinderella in America: A Book of Folk and Fairy Tales. Compiled and edited by

William Bernard McCarthy. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. xiv +

514 pp., appendix, bibliography, 4 indexes, 18 photographs.

The turn of the millennium signaled a change in the way that scholars and popularizers frame and package the folk narratives of the United States. Twentieth-century "American" folktale collections focused overwhelmingly on discrete traditions limited to a single state (J. Russell Reaver's Florida Folktales [1988]), region (Vance Randolph's six collections from the Ozark Mountains), ethnicity (Jerome Mintz's Legends of the Hasidim [1968]), or some combination thereof (Jerome M. Carriere's Tales from the French Folk-Lore of Missouri [1937]). The few nationwide anthologies of the 1900s (such as Benjamin Botkin's Treasury of American Folklore [1944] and Kemp P. Battle's Great American Folklore [1986]) titled themselves with the term "folklore" rather than "folktale" and mixed oral narratives with literary spinoffs and non-narrative genres. The published record of the twentieth century implies that there is no real "American" tradition, but rather innumerable mutually isolated traditions shaped by separate values and circumstances.

But since 2000, three large collections have attempted, in very different ways, to embrace the whole sweep of American storytelling, and all identify "folktales" (or, in McCarthy's case, "folk tales") in their titles. All, by design or otherwise, display not only the diversity of the...

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