This only took us a little more than a decade.
The image is linked to the publisher website (click on it to see more).
And here’s the publisher’s description:
Nearly seven decades after the English translation of Morphology of the Folktale, one of the most influential scholarly books on folklore, its sequel is finally available in an official English translation, completing the enterprise that occupied much of Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp’s life.
In Morphology of the Folktale, Propp approached these narratives synchronically, using structural analysis to identify the wondertale’s minimal units and deep structure. In Historical Roots of the Wondertale, he broadens and deepens his analysis, comparing folktale structures and content to rituals and customs of aboriginal societies from around the world and with people who were the first to envision religion and myth. Relying on both structural and historical-comparative methods, Propp sees the roots of the wondertale in rituals from earlier stages of human development, whose narratives were repurposed as their tellers settled into agricultural societies and ancient rituals were no longer practiced.
With a new introduction, conclusion, translators’ notes, and a full bibliography, Historical Roots of the Wondertale complements and expands upon the Morphology, completing Propp’s search for the origins of wondertales, myths, and religious practices.
Our intro explains why the first book is still known as Morphology of the Folktale, while the sequel is called Historical Roots of the Wondertale, in other words, how the folktale and the wondertale are, in fact, identical in this case.
A couple of presentations and one essay, “When Dragons Show Themselves: Research, Constructing Knowledge, and the Practice of Translation” (in Know: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge) were by-products.
Another has been percolating since I started thinking about the book’s Chapter Seven, “At the River of Fire,” which is all about dragons a.k.a., serpents. We struggled with this being the same thing (zmei) and not the same thing at all: serpents, even when they’re big, tend to be rather land-bound, while dragons, at least in their modern versions, are flying creatures. So this was in my mind as I continued to work on my Sea of Intimacy, and now I have a thought that I don’t want to spoil by writing about it too much here. In short, a hypothesis about how, when, and under what conditions the iconography changed and how they went from being mostly slithering to mostly soaring.
More when I can express it with greater certainty. For now, Propp is plenty.
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Russell Scott Valentino 