This paper draws upon a theory of stories that relates particular text structures to particular affective states and then relates the affective states to story intuitions and overall judgments of liking. The first section of the paper outlines the theory as it deals with some important properties of the genre of popular stories in Western literature. The second section describes a recent series of experiments suggesting that this structural-affect theory accounts for a number of aspects of the story schema in English speaking readers. The next two sections provide an analytic framework that can be used to examine the conventionalized aspects of stories and then apply this framework to cross cultural work on oral literature. The final section presents some hypotheses about the nature of the universal and culture-specific aspects of stories from the oral tradition and contrasts them with those of written stories from Western popular literature. (FL)