The Historical Roots of Magical Stories

Author: (Russia) Propp, translated by Jia Fang
Publisher:
Publishing Date: 2006-11-01
Features: The History of the Magic Tale was first published in 1946. It is a sister work to Propp's Morphology of the Folktale by the renowned Russian folklorist V. Y. Propp. It marks the author's shift from structural type studies to historical type analysis of Russian magic tales. After structurally describing the magic tale and clarifying what it is, the next step is to trace its origins and explore its historical roots. At this stage, "we wish to study which phenomena of the past (not events) correspond to Russian tales and have their roots in historical reality." The book is richly referenced, citing a vast array of folkloric phenomena, local knowledge, dialect tales, and the works of famous anthropologists and folklorists, demonstrating the author's solid academic foundation. It stands as a model of anthropological research on folktales in the 20th century. The content of this book has been introduced relatively little in China, and this is the first full translation from the Russian edition.