There are many rich folktales around the world. From the Magic Orange Tree of Haiti to the Magic of Mushkil Gusha of Persia, stories blend vivid imagination with nuggets of reality to give colourful and action-oriented ways of looking at the world of make-belief. Such is the case that after enjoying nights of laughter in the camaraderie of an audience, literary scholars would take to the task of attempting to sift out the mould that a folktale followed. The first attempts at categorizing folktales soon revealed their depth and variety; they were simply too vast to be contained by decimal systems. When categories did not overlap, they were at times often misleading.

It was therefore a major theoretical breakthrough when Vladimir Propp published his classic study Morphology of the Folktale in 1928, in which he spoke of the morphology or the study of the structure or form of folktales. Propp argued that tales could indeed be classified and compared, but that thus far it was inaccurate methodology that hindered the process. Propp purported that if actions were studied, a useful yardstick could be chipped from the forest of seamless creativity. In pursuit of this standard, Propp devised a sequence of thirty-one functions, which he claimed all folktales followed. This hypertext will test the cross-cultural merits of Propp's Theory of Narrativity by applying it to Ananse folktales, which have originated in Ghana.

Image courtesy of Badoe and Diakite The Pot of Wisdom