Möbius Media

Jeffrey A. Tolbertis assistant professor of American studies and folklore at Penn State Harrisburg. His research focuses on vernacular belief and the supernatural, pop culture (especially the horror genre), and digital ethnography. He is coeditor of The Folkloresque.  Michael Dylan Foster is professor of East Asian languages and cultures at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of The Book of Yōkai and Pandemonium and Parade, which won the Chicago Folklore Prize in 2009, and coeditor of The Folkloresque. He has written numerous other works on Japanese folklore, cultural heritage, festival, and media.

“This fascinating collection explores the shifting boundaries between traditional folklore and commercial culture at a moment when vernacular and participatory culture thrives and people seek 'authenticity' even in their fictions."—Henry Jenkins, coeditor of Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination"A vital ongoing elaboration of a supremely useful concept for those interested in pop culture, literature, anthropology, and folklore studies."—Roger Luckhurst, Birkbeck, University of London  “A valuable contribution that builds a nuanced and highly productive theoretical framework for understanding a range of cultural forms that might otherwise seem peripheral to the field or have been dismissed as misguided or outmoded popular understandings of ‘folklore.’”—Jennifer Schacker, University of Guelph  “Invaluable for folklorists and for all scholars, and indeed anyone seeking to navigate and describe the complexity of the hypermodern cultural landscape in our era of ‘vernacular hybridity,’ in which distinctions between popular/folk/elite, institutional/vernacular, official/informal, commercial/noncommercial, anonymous/authored, online/offline, fictional/factual are breaking down.”—Lowell Brower, University of Wisconsin