Vladimir Propp examined hundreds of fairytales in the generic form 'The Folk Wondertale' which was published in Russia in 1928. Although it was generally unnoticed in the West until it was translated in the 1950s.
Within 'The Monopoly of the Fairytale' he identified: 8 typical characters and 31 functions and these can be applied to almost any story, be it in literature, film, theatre and television. Propps theory is a form of structuralism which is a view that all media is inevitably in the form of certain fixed structures.
These structures are often culturally derived and form expectations in the mind of an audience from within that same culture. Thus genre structures form expectations in the mind of an audience that certain rules apply to the narrative. However cultural change can force structures to change, for example it is now common for the hero to be a woman.
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