Poem in the Story

Harold Scheub is the Evjue-Bascom Professor of Humanities in the Department of African Languages and Literature at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is the author of many books, including Story; The Tongue Is Fire: South African Storytellers and Apartheid; and editor of The World and the Word, all published by the University of Wisconsin Press.

"Scheub has gone to much greater length than any scholar I know to deduce, by extrapolating from as wide a reach of evidence as possible, the driving aesthetic impulse in a storytelling tradition. His concentrated gaze on the organizing ‘lyrical center’ enables Scheub to show why a good story is a good story, whether in an oral or a literate tradition."—Isidore Okpewho, SUNY–Binghamton