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"Johnny I Want My Liver Back”: revisiting a teenage folktale in the digital age
In the early 1990s, whilst conducting fieldwork for doctoral research into the oral
narrative traditions of teenagers in Britain and Ireland, I collected many versions of
a story called ‘Johnny, I want My Liver Back’. The story was particularly popular
amongst younger teenagers and was a ‘jump’ story, a tale that employs a closing
formula that increases the tension of the narration and ends with the storyteller
shouting the final words in order to give the listener a start. The story tells of a
young boy (Johnny) who is sent on an errand to buy some liver for tea. On the way
he gets distracted and spends the money on sweets, so instead goes to the
graveyard and steals the liver from a freshly buried corpse. That evening the ghost
of the deceased returns to reclaim the stolen organ. It is a story that is primarily a
variant of ‘The Man from the Gallows’ (ATU 366), but also draws heavily from
some versions of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ (ATU 333), formerly ‘The Glutton’
(AT 333), notably the story of ‘Uncle Wolf,’ as published by Calvino in Italian
Folktales (1980). This chapter provides an analysis of the story, but also explores
how the story has fared in the hands of a new generation. Since then we have
witnessed the arrival of the internet, Web 2.0 and self-publication via platforms such as YouTube. This chapter explores the story in the online space and its
modern presentations in the global storytelling space. Through examples it shows
that oral narrative traditions appear to be alive and well amongst today’s teenagers.
History
School
- The Arts, English and Drama
Department
- English and Drama
Published in
Storytelling: Global Reflections on Narrative (5th Global Conference) Proceedings of Storytelling: Global Reflections on Narrative (5th Global Conference)Citation
WILSON, M., 2014. "Johnny I Want My Liver Back”: revisiting a teenage folktale in the digital age. Presented at: The 5th Global Conference, Storytelling: Global Reflections on Narrative, 10th-13th May 2014, Lisbon, Portugal.Publisher
Interdisciplinary-net PressVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Publication date
2014Notes
This is a conference paper.Language
- en