ABSTRACT
In this paper I propose an approach to folk-narrative analysis based on the study of the contextual changes introduced by different speakers into standard narratives. This approach enables us to examine the influence of the cultural environment on the genetic process of the folktale. The proposal is based on the study of Argentinian oral folk narratives collected in fieldwork from 1985 to 1994 in our “General Corpus of Argentinian Folk Narratives.” This corpus contains almost 100 versions, whose texts were established according to dialectological criteria of spelling and transcription. The first results of this research have already been discussed in my doctoral thesis, “The Dynamics of Variation in the Folktale.” In this thesis I characterize the folk-narrative text as a complex discourse that expresses the cultural blending process of a heterogeneous community.
