Morphology of the Folktale
and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle .
Learn more
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £1.40
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in Morphology of the Folk Tale (Bibliographical and Special) for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £1.40, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
Propp's work is seminal...Ýand , now that it is available in a new edition, should be even more valuable to folklorists who are directing their attention to the form of the folktale, especially to those structural characteristics which are common to many entries coming from even different cultures.
Product Description
"Morphology will in all probability be regarded by future generations as one of the major theoretical breakthroughs in the field of folklore in the twentieth century." -- Alan Dundes "Propp's work is seminal...[and], now that it is available in a new edition, should be even more valuable to folklorists who are directing their attention to the form of the folktale, especially to those structural characteristics which are common to many entries coming from even different cultures." -- Choice
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
20 of 21 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is the first work to systematically characterize and describe a corpus of folktales. It includes a list of possible plot twists, in their correct chronological order for any story, and numerous examples from actual Russian fairy tales. This translation in particular reads well and makes a point of not departing from the text's literal meaning in any significant way. I would highly recommend this work for anyone interested in folktales or oral literature in general.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
10 reviews
33 of 35 people found the following review helpful
Ian Myles Slater on: Brilliant, But Hard Going
10 Nov 2003
Format:Paperback
This is an attempt to work out the underlying structural patterns (types of characters, what they do, how they are ordered) of Russian folktales, based on classic collections made in the nineteenth-century. If you are fortunate enough to have read a large collection of such stories -- preferably in translation, not "retold by ..." -- you will soon see the point of Propp's argument. Other European, and some non-European, traditions provide an almost equally good starting point, although the examples often are not so close as to be immediately convincing. Ideally, "Morphology of the Folktale" would be bound with at least a selection of the Russian folktales Propp analyzes, but this does not seem likely to happen.
Taken by itself, however, Propp's exploration is going to seem both dry and confusing. Try to imagine a book about the five-act structure of Shakespeare's tragedies being read by someone who had never seen or read a play before, and you may understand the problem.
Although Propp's exposition sometimes seems labored, he presents a convincing case that at least some oral prose narratives are built up of a stock of situations and events which can be slightly reordered, multiplied, and otherwise complicated, but amount to a "language" (a vocabulary, grammar, and syntax) of story-telling. This puts a new light on the problem of the distribution of folktales, and how they develop variants, two of the great issues of folklore studies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Despite its origins in a single body of oral literature, Propp's methods have been applied to other literature with known or suspected oral roots, sometimes with slightly contradictory results. I know of at least two different Proppian analyses of "Beowulf," for example. This is due at least in part to Propp's attempt to introduce fine divisions between similar plot elements, which, again, seem to work better with his source material than with other groups of stories. (And "Beowulf" has long been recognized to include elements later found in European fairy tales, so the possibility of applying Propp's structures was more intriguing than revolutionary.)
In "Feud in the Icelandic Saga" (1983), Jesse Byock reviewed efforts to apply Propp's methods to the Sagas of the Icelanders, another body of prose literature supposed to be grounded in oral techniques. He argued that a different approach is needed to their formally realistic stories about personalities, and the functioning of society; which does not diminish the validity of Propp's approach to the wonder-tale.
Taken by itself, however, Propp's exploration is going to seem both dry and confusing. Try to imagine a book about the five-act structure of Shakespeare's tragedies being read by someone who had never seen or read a play before, and you may understand the problem.
Although Propp's exposition sometimes seems labored, he presents a convincing case that at least some oral prose narratives are built up of a stock of situations and events which can be slightly reordered, multiplied, and otherwise complicated, but amount to a "language" (a vocabulary, grammar, and syntax) of story-telling. This puts a new light on the problem of the distribution of folktales, and how they develop variants, two of the great issues of folklore studies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Despite its origins in a single body of oral literature, Propp's methods have been applied to other literature with known or suspected oral roots, sometimes with slightly contradictory results. I know of at least two different Proppian analyses of "Beowulf," for example. This is due at least in part to Propp's attempt to introduce fine divisions between similar plot elements, which, again, seem to work better with his source material than with other groups of stories. (And "Beowulf" has long been recognized to include elements later found in European fairy tales, so the possibility of applying Propp's structures was more intriguing than revolutionary.)
In "Feud in the Icelandic Saga" (1983), Jesse Byock reviewed efforts to apply Propp's methods to the Sagas of the Icelanders, another body of prose literature supposed to be grounded in oral techniques. He argued that a different approach is needed to their formally realistic stories about personalities, and the functioning of society; which does not diminish the validity of Propp's approach to the wonder-tale.
26 of 28 people found the following review helpful
This seminal work is excellent
28 Sep 1999
Format:Paperback
This seminal work is essential for an understanding of structuralist theory and the theory of folklore. It differs from the psychological view of the folktale in its descriptive ability. This theory is based on objective description and sytagmatic conjunction and complementation. Because of that, it is more applicable and flexible than any psychological dissection. Also, two people will reach roughly the same conclusions with this method- something impossible with a psychological approach. This is excellent for anyone interested in attacking the down and dirty working parts of a narrative.
17 of 17 people found the following review helpful
A systematic diagram of the Russian folktale.
1 Dec 1998
Format:Paperback
This is the first work to systematically characterize and describe a corpus of folktales. It includes a list of possible plot twists, in their correct chronological order for any story, and numerous examples from actual Russian fairy tales. This translation in particular reads well and makes a point of not departing from the text's literal meaning in any significant way. I would highly recommend this work for anyone interested in folktales or oral literature in general.
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
- Books > Mind, Body & Spirit > Mythology > Folklore
- Books > Society, Politics & Philosophy > Academic Sociology
- Books > Society, Politics & Philosophy > Social Sciences > Anthropology > Customs & Folklore > Customs
- Books > Society, Politics & Philosophy > Social Sciences > Anthropology > Customs & Folklore > Folklore
- Books > Society, Politics & Philosophy > Social Sciences > Sociology
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
