Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp was a well-known philologist and professor at Leningrad University. He made a significant contribution to the development of the structural-typological approach to the study of folklore, which became widely used in literary studies. His works, such as “Morphology of the Folktale” and “Historical Roots of the Magic Folktale,” became classics of 20th-century world scholarship.
This book brings together Propp’s best articles, including “Folklore and Reality,” in which he examines the features of folklore as an object of study—its patterns of development and the origins of genres, plots, and images in Russian and world folklore.