Moving Tales:
Narrative Drift in Oral Culture and Scripted Theatre * Copyright © 2007 The Johns Hopkins University Press. This article first appeared in NEW LITERARY HISTORY, Volume 37, Issue 4 (2006): 725–38. 1. Jack Students of British popular culture have often collected valuable evidence in North America. Broadly speaking, there are two attitudes that may be taken toward such a provenance. On the one hand, the American environment may be seen as a preservative: the Appalachian mountains, for example, are isolated enough that a transplanted folk-tale gathered there may be seen as more authentic than if it had been gathered in Britain: insulated from agents of change in its place of origin, the tale is as if sealed in a time capsule; it has not had to adapt to the altering circumstances of industrial society, mass culture, and so forth. Another line of thinking, however, would say that the American environment, be it never so “isolated,” is distant — in space and in culture — from the British Is...