folkloristics Folklore studies (also known as folkloristics, tradition studies or folk life studies in the UK) is the academic discipline devoted to the study of folklore. This term, along with its synonyms, gained currency in the 1950s to distinguish the ac ...

, morphology is the study of the structure of folklore and

fairy tale A fairy tale (alternative names include fairytale, fairy story, household tale, magic tale, or wonder tale) is a short story that belongs to the folklore genre. Such stories typically feature magic, enchantments, and mythical or fanciful bei ...

s. Some pioneering work in this field was begun in the nineteenth century, such as

Marian Roalfe Cox Marian Roalfe Cox (30 August 1860 – 1916) was an English folklorist who pioneered studies in Morphology for the fairy tale '' Cinderella''. Biography Cox was born in London. She joined the Folklore Society of Britain in 1888, and became ...

's work on

Cinderella "Cinderella", or "The Little Glass Slipper", is a Folklore, folk tale with thousands of variants that are told throughout the world.Dundes, Alan. Cinderella, a Casebook. Madison, Wis: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988. The protagonist is a you ...

, ''Cinderella: Three Hundred and Forty-Five Variants of Cinderella, Catskin and, Cap O' Rushes, Abstracted and Tabulated with a Discussion of Medieval Analogues and Notes''.If The Shoe Fits: Folklorists' criteria for #510
However, folkloristic morphology took on much more form in the twentieth century, driven by the work of two researchers and theorists: Russian scholar

Vladimir Propp Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp (; – 22 August 1970) was a Soviet folklorist and scholar who analysed the basic structural elements of Russian folk tales to identify their simplest irreducible structural units. Biography Vladimir Propp was ...

and Finnish folklorist

Antti Aarne Antti Amatus Aarne (5 December 1867 – 2 February 1925) was a Finnish folklorist. Background Aarne was a student of Kaarle Krohn, the son of the folklorist Julius Krohn. He further developed their historic-geographic method of comparative ...

. Antti Aarne's theories, enlarged and expanded by American folklorist

Stith Thompson Stith Thompson (March 7, 1885 – January 10, 1976) was an American folklore studies, folklorist: he has been described as "America's most important folklorist". He is the "Thompson" of the Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index, which indexes Folklore, ...

in 1961 and by

Hans-Jörg Uther Hans-Jörg Uther (born 20 July 1944) is a German literary scholar and folklorist. Biography Born 20 July 1944, in Herzberg am Harz, Uther studied Folklore, Germanistik and History between 1969 and 1970 at the University of Munich and between 1970 ...

in 2004, look at motifs rather than actions – for example, "a soldier makes a deal with the devil" or "a soldier marries the youngest of three sisters". More than 2500 folk and fairy tales have been cataloged under this

taxonomy image:Hierarchical clustering diagram.png, 280px, Generalized scheme of taxonomy Taxonomy is a practice and science concerned with classification or categorization. Typically, there are two parts to it: the development of an underlying scheme o ...

; the AaTh or Aarne–Thompson number is as well-known to

folklorists Folklore studies (also known as folkloristics, tradition studies or folk life studies in the UK) is the academic discipline devoted to the study of folklore. This term, along with its synonyms, gained currency in the 1950s to distinguish the ac ...

Francis James Child Francis James Child (February 1, 1825 – September 11, 1896) was an American scholar, educator, and folklorist, best known today for his collection of English and Scottish ballads now known as the Child Ballads. Child was Boylston professor ...

's identification of

ballads A ballad is a form of verse, often a narrative set to music. Ballads were particularly characteristic of the popular poetry and song of Great Britain and Ireland from the Late Middle Ages until the 19th century. They were widely used across Eur ...

are to scholars of

folk song Folk music is a music genre that includes #Traditional folk music, traditional folk music and the Contemporary folk music, contemporary genre that evolved from the former during the 20th-century folk revival. Some types of folk music may be ca ...

was a Russian

formalist Formalism may refer to: * Legal formalism, legal positivist view that the substantive justice of a law is a question for the legislature rather than the judiciary * Formalism (linguistics) * Scientific formalism * A rough synonym to the Formal sys ...

scholar. He criticized Aarne's work for ignoring what motifs ''did'' in a tale, and analysed the basic plot, or action, components of Russian folk tales to identify their simplest irreducible narrative elements. His ''Morphology of the Folktale'' was published in Russian in 1928 and influenced

Claude Lévi-Strauss Claude Lévi-Strauss ( ; ; 28 November 1908 – 30 October 2009) was a Belgian-born French anthropologist and ethnologist whose work was key in the development of the theories of structuralism and structural anthropology. He held the chair o ...

and

Roland Barthes Roland Gérard Barthes (; ; 12 November 1915 – 25 March 1980) was a French literary theorist, essayist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. His work engaged in the analysis of a variety of sign systems, mainly derived from Western popu ...

, though it received little attention from Western scholars until it was translated into English in the 1950s. In

Afanasyev Afanasyev (masculine; Афанасьев) or Afanasyeva (feminine; Афанасьева) is a Russian last name. It is derived from Afanasy (disambiguation), Afanasy which is etymologically directly connected to Athanasios (Αθανάσιος), a ...

's collection of Russian fairy tales, Propp found a limited number of plot elements or "functions" that constructed all. These elements occurred in a standard, consistent sequence. He derived thirty-one generic functions, such as "a difficult task is proposed" or "donor tests the hero" or "a magical agent is directly transferred".

References

Folklore studies Literary criticism Literary theory Morphology {{lit-criticism-stub

See also

References