The Storied Time of Folklore

Time is intrinsic to Folklore: fundamentally embedded in the concepts of Tradition, Salvage, Remnants, as well as incorporated into the forms of folklore as they are defined and selected/collected/remembered. Folklore's temporality, however, is under-theorized in the field: Time is taken as a given. This article revisits Folklore's temporality as well as its conventional attitude towards the relationship between time and narrative, paying particular attention to Alan Dundes' work. It argues that although Dundes did not problematize the relationship of time and narrative, his work, nonetheless provides opportunities for its retheorizing.