Last class I reviewed Adrienne's (sorry if that's not spelled correctly!) portion of the presentation from the group that is doing the final project on the Scottish chapbooks. Overall, I found the presentation to be really interesting and I learned a lot about the books. Its really cool that the University of Guelph has one of (if not) the largest collection of chapbooks in the world, and its great that our class and this group has decided to do a significant amount of work on them.
So, what I gathered from the presentation is that each individual person is selecting several chapbooks to work with as they study a specific topic they have chosen. In Adrienne's case, she chose to look at fairy tales and folklore in the chapbooks, which I thought was a really interesting idea and something that most people can relate to, as we can probably all remember being read fairy tales as children. The ones she came across in the chapbooks were Cinderella, Robin Hood and Sleeping Beauty. An issue she encountered was that many titles of the chapbooks sound like they could have something to do with Scottish folklore, however they don't. I can imagine how frustrating this would be and it must have been a lot of work to sort through the books to find ones that suited her needs.
I thought Adrienne did a great job presenting. She clearly outlined what she has planned to do with her portion of the project and showed us the progress she has made thus far. She spoke clearly and steadily and I appreciated her passing around the copy of the Brothers' Grim original fairy tales book she found at the library. I found it helped the class to stay engaged and it was fascinating to look through. I can't wait to see the final project for the Scottish chapbooks, especially the section on fairy tales. Well done to the entire group!
