Stories and narratives are two words that are often interchangeable. In the context of literary preservation however, distinction has to be made. A story is a body of text that focuses on the subject, time, and space (Smith, 1981). A narrative instead ignores all these aspects and focuses on the plot. It is a story stripped out of settings, purely as a series of events (Abbott, 2008, p.20). By this definition, in the perspective of a narrative, Cinderella and Mulan may not be two different pieces, because both went through a similar course of events (Smith, 1980). In fact, there has been a study published in 1893 by Marian Roalfe Cox that dug up a total of 345 different versions of Cinderella across the world, yet to include the cartoon and
