Russian formalist Vladimir Propp, in his book Morphology of the Folk Tale, described in rather abstract terms a set of recurring plot devices that he found in a certain genre of Russian folk tales. Not all of them are there and they don't all happen in the same order in the stories he studied, but they are a large part of how we recognize a text as a fairy tale; although sometimes you have to smush the tropes to make them fit right. This was probably one of the first critical trope-spottings. The typical sequence of functions is: