Review of Bertel Nathhorst, Formal or Structural Studies of Traditional Tales: The Usefulness of Some Methodological Proposals Advanced by Vladimir Propp, Alan Dundes, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Edmund Leach

While formalism and structuralism became key concepts in linguistics, literary criticism, and the social sciences during the first half of the twentieth century, they appeared in folklore research only in the late fifties and early sixties, as a direct result of the publication of Claude Lévi-Strauss' "The Structural Study of Myth" (Journal of American Folklore, 68 [1955], 428-444) and the 1958 translation of Propp's Morfologija skazki (Moscow-Leningrad, 1928). Since then, structural studies in folklore have multiplied by the dozens, encompassing such genres as proverbs, riddles, ballads, and chants. Alan Dundes and Edmund Leach were among the first to elaborate upon the research of their predecessors, applying, respectively, the theories of Propp and Lévi-Strauss to new bodies of literature, and developing new analytical methods.