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Desire and Truth
Functions of Plot in Eighteenth-Century English Novels
Patricia Meyer Spacks
University of Chicago Press, 1990
Desire and Truth offers a major reassessment of the history of eighteenth-century fiction by showing how plot challenges or reinforces conventional categories of passion and rationality. Arguing that fiction creates and conveys its essential truths through plot, Patricia Meyer Spacks demonstrates that eighteenth-century fiction is both profoundly realistic and consistently daring.
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From Plot to Narrative
Ellis, Elizabeth
Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2012

Each of the twelve chapters represents a rung on the ladder of dynamic narrative development.  Beginning with the most basic plot outline, Ellis leads readers through exercises and discussions of elements that build a story into a memorable reading or listening experience.  The chapters include many topics of interest to all writers, regardless of medium, but some will speak most potently to those writing either fiction or personal narrative. Chapters include Characterization, Point of View, Emotion, Context, Imagery, and Connection [with the reader].  Herself a leading professional storyteller, Ellis also includes a chapter especially for those who plan to craft stories for oral performance.

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Losing the Plot
Film and Feeling in the Modern Novel
Pardis Dabashi
University of Chicago Press, 2023
An examination of the relationship between literature and classical Hollywood cinema reveals a profound longing for plot in modernist fiction.

The modernist novel sought to escape what Virginia Woolf called the “tyranny” of plot. Yet even as twentieth-century writers pushed against the constraints of plot-driven Victorian novels, plot kept its hold on them through the influence of another medium: the cinema. Focusing on the novels of Nella Larsen, Djuna Barnes, and William Faulkner—writers known for their affinities and connections to classical Hollywood—Pardis Dabashi links the moviegoing practices of these writers to the tensions between the formal properties of their novels and the characters in them. Even when they did not feature outright happy endings, classical Hollywood films often provided satisfying formal resolutions and promoted normative social and political values. Watching these films, modernist authors were reminded of what they were leaving behind—both formally and in the name of aesthetic experimentalism—by losing the plot.
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A Plot of Her Own
The Female Protagonist in Russian Literature
Sona Stephan Hoisington
Northwestern University Press, 1995
A Plot of Her Own presents compelling new readings of major texts in the Russian literary canon, all of which are readily available in translation. The female protagonists in the works examined are inextricably linked with the fundamental issues raised by the novels they inform; the interpretations offered strive not to be reductive or doctrinaire, not to be imposed from the outside but to arise from the texts themselves and the historical circumstances in which they were written. Authors discussed include Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Bulgakov, and the novels considered range from Fathers and Children to Zamyatin's anti-Utopian We. Throughout, the contributors new visions expand our understanding of the words and reveal new significance in them.
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Poetics Of Plot
The Case of English Renaissance Drama
Thomas Pavel
University of Minnesota Press, 1985
A unique methodology for plot analysis focusing on an important body of English Renaissance dramas. "Lucid, rich, and consistently thought-provoking This book marks a decisive advance in formal plot analysis." Poetics Today
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Reading for the Plot
Design and Intention in Narrative
Peter Brooks
Harvard University Press, 1992
A book which should appeal to both literary theorists and to readers of the novel, this study invites the reader to consider how the plot reflects the patterns of human destiny and seeks to impose a new meaning on life.
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A Sudden Terror
The Plot to Murder the Pope in Renaissance Rome
Anthony F. D'Elia
Harvard University Press, 2009

In 1468, on the final night of Carnival in Rome, Pope Paul II sat enthroned above the boisterous crowd, when a scuffle caught his eye. His guards had intercepted a mysterious stranger trying urgently to convey a warning—conspirators were lying in wait to slay the pontiff. Twenty humanist intellectuals were quickly arrested, tortured on the rack, and imprisoned in separate cells in the damp dungeon of Castel Sant’Angelo.

Anthony D’Elia offers a compelling, surprising story that reveals a Renaissance world that witnessed the rebirth of interest in the classics, a thriving homoerotic culture, the clash of Christian and pagan values, the contest between republicanism and a papal monarchy, and tensions separating Christian Europeans and Muslim Turks. Using newly discovered sources, he shows why the pope targeted the humanists, who were seen as dangerously pagan in their Epicurean morals and their Platonic beliefs about the soul and insurrectionist in their support of a more democratic Church. Their fascination with Sultan Mehmed II connected them to the Ottoman Turks, enemies of Christendom, and the love of the classical world tied them to recent rebellious attempts to replace papal rule with a republic harking back to the glorious days of Roman antiquity.

From the cosmetic-wearing, parrot-loving pontiff to the Turkish sultan, savage in war but obsessed with Italian culture, D’Elia brings to life a Renaissance world full of pageantry, mayhem, and conspiracy and offers a fresh interpretation of humanism as a dynamic communal movement.

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Taking Her Seriously
Penelope and the Plot of Homer's Odyssey
Richard Heitman
University of Michigan Press, 2005
"[Heitman] provides a sensitive critical study of the Odyssey in which he strives to better appreciate the poem by focusing on the familial interactions in Ithaca . . . Heitman's interpretations . . . are unfailingly clear and thought-provoking. Highly recommended."
---Choice
"It is an example of a neat and valuable contribution which is both intelligible to non-specialists and inspiring for psychologists and classicists. It demonstrates that research into Homer still is . . . capable of extracting ever-new exciting ideas from Homer's texts."
---Bryn Mawr Classical Review
Taking Her Seriously is a reevaluation of Penelope, one of the most universally admired female characters in Western classical literature. Casting her in a new light, Richard Heitman emphasizes the courage, steadfastness, and integrity of this iconic figure while she faces potentially tragic decisions.
Homer's treatment of events in Ithaca and the motivations of Penelope throughout the denser books of the Odyssey reveals a complicated, serious, independent, and insightful thinker whose actions are crucial to guaranteeing the well-being of her home and a safe future for her son, and for Odysseus as well.
Through this thematic approach to the text, Penelope comes into focus as a loving wife whose role is far more important than passive fidelity to a wandering husband. Her integrity and wisdom in Odysseus' absence set the stage for his violent and triumphant return, and secure her place as a female role model in even the most modern of contexts.
Richard Heitman is Assistant Professor of Classics and Philosophy at Carthage College.
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The Victorian Novel of Adulthood
Plot and Purgatory in Fictions of Maturity
Rebecca Rainof
Ohio University Press, 2015

In The Victorian Novel of Adulthood, Rebecca Rainof confronts the conventional deference accorded the bildungsroman as the ultimate plot model and quintessential expression of Victorian nation building. The novel of maturity, she contends, is no less important to our understanding of narrative, Victorian culture, and the possibilities of fiction.

Reading works by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Henry James, John Henry Newman, and Virginia Woolf, Rainof exposes the little-discussed theological underpinnings of plot and situates the novel of maturity in intellectual and religious history, notably the Oxford Movement. Purgatory, a subject hotly debated in the period, becomes a guiding metaphor for midlife adventure in secular fiction. Rainof discusses theological models of gradual maturation, thus directing readers’ attention away from evolutionary theory and geology, and offers a new historical framework for understanding Victorian interest in slow and deliberate change.

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