Subverted Epic Oral Tradition in South Slavic Written Literatures, 16th–19th Centuries

The presence of folkloric elements—as well as the fascination by “primitive” modes of expression—can be detected within the most diverse literary trends and periods. Thus, in the first edition of Motif-Index of Folk Literature, Stith Thomson discovered twenty-eight folkloric motifs in fifty-eight stories from Boccaccio’s Decameron. In the second edition of Thomson’s book, however, there was an increase in both the number of motifs and the number of the stories in which they appear: 128 motifs in eighty-nine stories. Although—with a few exceptions, including the Miller’s Tale—the sources of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales have been established as literary, some researchers insist that “folkloric analogies” exist in twenty-two out of twenty-eight stories included in the collection. According to John Ashton, even the plays of Ben Jonson—despite the playwright’s strong classicistic inclinations—