The Formalism of the Story of Aladdin and the Magic Lamp

The present article studies and analyzes the story of Aladdin and the Magic Lamp، a famous story in the collection of one-thousand-and-one-nights stories. In the early twentieth century، a group of Russian humanities scholars started to structurally analyze literary texts; they called themselves formalists. The most famous formalist was Alexander Prop، who structurally analyzed a collection of Russian fairy tales compiled by Afanasiv. Prop called his analytic method formalism،. i. e. the study of the constituents forming the story and the relations among them. Inasmuch as Prop's work has some shortcomings and cannot be applied to every story، the present research seeks to exploit a new innovative

First، the story was analyzed into a horizontal structure representing the reader's eyes. Then، the main functions of the story were determined. Finally، the story was vertically analyzed، which represents the narrator's view. Hence، the components of the story were analyzed completely.