Motif story

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The history of motifs is a sub-discipline of literary studies that examines the history of motifs or complexes of motifs . The story of the motif diachronically represents a concrete motif or a complex of motifs. The constants and variants, individual or epoch-specific preferences determined allow conclusions to be drawn about the function of motifs in the text, the historical modification of meaning structures and their historical and social mediation.

Using live history that has German deals since its constitution as a science in the early 19th century: from the history of motifs that appear in the "Household Tales" as well as in other genres of folk poetry, can be determined by Wilhelm Grimm , a "urdeutscher myth" opinion reconstruct. Subsequently, Germanists concentrated on researching motifs on their age, origin, change and distribution. Their results were decisive for fairy tale research, especially for the “Finnish merach school” founded by Krohn and Aarne . Positivism, on the other hand, sought to gain information about literary relationships of dependency from the consideration of motifs, which brought about the atomistic exploration and registration of content elements. Efforts in German-language comparative literature in the 1970s to replace the historically charged concept of the history of material and motifs with " thematology " and thereby at the same time to bring about a methodological-theoretical reorientation triggered an intensive discussion that continues to this day. More recent monographs on the history of motifs seek “by contrast analysis to gain important clues for determining the historical and aesthetic specifics of individual works”, while the motif lexicons continue to be more committed to positivistic collecting. In addition, however, the conventional description of affinities to galt and epoch is still practiced and the search for existential or anthropological basic patterns is also ongoing. Accordingly, studies of the history of motives draw on a cross-cultural approach in the present.

literature