Results by title
7 books match the query 'Plot'
A Plot of Her Own
The Female Protagonist in Russian LiteratureSona Stephan Hoisington
Northwestern University Press, 1995
Desire and Truth
Functions of Plot in Eighteenth-Century English NovelsPatricia Meyer Spacks
University of Chicago Press, 1990
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.
Losing the Plot
Film and Feeling in the Modern NovelPardis Dabashi
University of Chicago Press, 2023
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.
Poetics Of Plot
The Case of English Renaissance DramaThomas Pavel
University of Minnesota Press, 1985
Thomas Pavel has written extensively on poetics, linguistics, and narratology. In this book he proposes an original theory and methodology of plot analysis—a reading that draws upon the most fruitful aspects of literary structuralism and upon contemporary linguistic models (specifically generative grammar). Theorists have tended to use formal plot analysis to examine relatively simple literary artifacts, like folk tales and short stories; Pavel, however, applies his model to a group of English Renaissance tragedies and demonstrates that plot analysis can make a major contribution to the understanding of sophisticated literary texts.
Pavel leads the reader through step-by-step analyses of increasingly complex plot structures as he explicates Marlowe’s Tamburlaine I, the Jew of Malta, Doctor Faustus and Edward the Second; Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy; The Arden Feversham; and, finally, Shakespeare’s King Lear. He has chosen these plays for their chronological proximity, yet their diversity allows for contrasts and typological considerations. The inclusion of most of Marlowe’s tragedies enables Pavel to gain new insights into a single writer’s strategies of plot construction.The Poetics of Plot moves beyond the establishment and application of a new theory of plot to address broader issues in cultural studies: the role of linguistic models in literary studies, the nature and function of agency in plot advancement and history, the universal features of plot organization, and the relation of plot patterns to period styles and dominant modes of organized knowledge. In his foreword to The Poetics of Plot, Wlad Godzich sketches the historical context in which Pavel’s discussion of plot appears and makes explicit the way that the study of plot challenges both the presuppositions of linguistic analysis and the status of action in philosophical thought.
Taking Her Seriously
Penelope and the Plot of Homer's OdysseyRichard Heitman
University of Michigan Press, 2005
---Choice
---Bryn Mawr Classical Review
The Victorian Novel of Adulthood
Plot and Purgatory in Fictions of MaturityRebecca 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.