"Old Stir Frye": Syncronic Correlative and Chronotope in an Appalachian Folktale Adaptation

“Old Dry Frye” (AT 1537, Corpse Killed Five Times) is the traditional tale of a circuit-riding preacher who comes to an untimely end through an unholy craving for fried chicken; whereupon his corpse rides a comic circuit around the community. During the American storytelling revival of the 1970s and ‘80s, the wandering preacher was rescued from the sepulcher of print and given new life on the festival circuit. In 1989, I created my own oral revisionist version, set in the New Age California, calling it “Old Stir Frye.” That adaptation, further adapted to print, is included here. The adaptive sequence provides occasion for revisiting the folktale adaptation process itself--exploring the analytical relationship between imaginative connectors that I call synchronic correlatives and the Bakhtinian concept of chronotope.