Abstract
Louisiana’s French-speaking cultures have long occupied a prominent place in the study of American folklore. Prior to the studies made by members of the budding academic discipline, a few travelers and literary figures provided much cultural information about Louisiana French culture and tradition. The 1727 Volume 67 of the travelogue of Père du Poisson (1959) describes in striking detail many of the difficulties encountered by Louisiana’s first French settlers, including important issues such as the problem of mosquitoes that, according to the good father, caused more imaginative cussing in the French language in the colony since its founding than had theretofore been heard. LePage du Pratz’s (1975) Histoire de la Louisiane of 1758 contains vivid descriptions of life in the colony, including the kinds of details of daily life that eventually led to the development of a Creolized culture. C. C. Robin (1807) recorded a wide variety of cultural information in his travelogue, Voyages dans l’intérieur de la Louisiane, including some fascinating accounts of Native American folklife An anonymous manuscript [generally attributed to Louisiana Justice Joseph A. Breaux and eventually edited by Jay K. Ditchy (1932)] is filled with information on Cajun folklife and language as early as the 1840s.1 In the 1850s, German traveler Karl Postl, writing under the name Charles Sealsfield (1986), recorded his (often unfavorable) observations of prairie Cajun culture while passing through Louisiana.
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Ancelet, B.J. (1997). Research on Louisiana French Folklore and Folklife. In: Valdman, A. (eds) French and Creole in Louisiana. Topics in Language and Linguistics. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-5278-6_14
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