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The present study focuses on the semiotic profile of a literary character acting as a villain/antagonist (Propp) as one of the central factors of the existential problem situation (the de facto “originator” of problems), which represents a general theme in the folk fairy tales and/or culture-forming stories. The aim of this paper is neither to cover all the principles and manifestations of antagonists exhaustively, nor to present a complete typological description of antagonistic characters, but to cover those basic forms and most frequent or otherwise essential attributes that canonically standardize and significantly universalize the archetype of an antagonist in the selected range of narratives. The issue is approached from the perspective of literary theory (with an emphasis on the morphological, structural, and thematic analysis of the literary characters), and it is materially and argumentatively based on the representative sets of folklore and culture-forming narratives (Aarne-Thompson-Uther’s international catalog of fairy tale types, world myths, canonical texts, etc.), as well as on their national (Slovak) variants.
Mariana Čechová (Mon,) studied this question.