An interpretation of Machiavellis play Mandragola, showing that the most ridiculous figure in the play is also its master conspirator, and represents Machiavelli himself.

Shortly after completing the manuscript of Austerlitz in the year 2000, W.G. Sebald was awarded a NESTA Fellowship in order to research his next book, which he referred to as the ‘W. W.’ (World War) Project. His grant application refers to ‘an extensive narrative which will encompass the period 1900-1950’. Over the next eighteen months he visited France and Germany several times in order to visit sites, archives and people. This essay examines Sebald’s plans for the project as well as interviews and recollections from the time, including reflections on his own family history and his late schoolfriend, Barbara Aenderl. It considers how the finished book might have developed the more traditional approach to narrative evident in Austerlitz, culminating in a comparison with Tolstoy’s War and Peace, a text which also combines fiction, history and critical reflection. Through considering both Tolstoy’s view of history and Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay on the subject, it suggests that Sebald’s unfinished World War Project would have constituted a similar panoramic attempt to interrogate both history and fiction as modes of writing.

The fourth chapter examines the depiction of torture in the Decameron. Boccaccio was fascinated by torture from both an epistemological and narratological standpoint. The greatest storyteller of the Middle Ages could not ignore the enticements of omniscience and narrative closure it proffers. The chapter argue specifically that Boccaccio saw a parallel between plot and due process, on the one hand, and torture and dénouement, on the other. What does torture tell us about the sense of an ending? The torture of Martellino by the sadistic Trevisan judge (2.1) is played as farce. In the tale of Zinevra-Sicruano (2.9), torture provides a happy ending within the fantasy world of romance. In the novella of Tedaldo (3.7), the romance of torture is domesticated by due process and the contingency of the novella form. Respect for due process and plot are abandoned in controversial final novella of the Decameron, the story of Griselda (10.10). After years of imposing unimaginable suffering on his young bride, Gualtieri finally gets his happy ending—but one that makes us question the nature of all endings.

Perhaps the most prominent cognitivist concept in recent narratology is the Theory of Mind. Alan Palmer, Lisa Zunshine and others have been highly influential with their claim that mind reading is at the core of our engagement with narrative in general. However, these scholars have not only ignored how controversial the idea of the Theory of Mind is in psychology – ancient literature, I believe, also belies their argument about narrative at large. Mind reading is certainly central to our responses to modern realist novels, but ancient narratives, as my test case, Heliodorus’ Ethiopica, illustrates, were more invested in the reconfiguration of time than in individualized minds. Plot was crucial for the experiential quality of narrative hailed by critics, as shown in Chapter 2. This prominence of plot is reflected in Aristotle’s Poetics and other critical works. In order not to play off plot against character, I propose experience as a category that integrates cognitive processes as well as matters of plot.

Chapter 5 touches on some of the points brought up in Chapter 3, notably ancient views of character, but has a different focus – narrative motivation, a category prominent particularly in story-oriented narratology. The Odyssey is the origin of the classical Western plot, and yet the motivation of the Penelope scenes in books 18 and 19 does not follow the logic which modern realist novels have made our default model. Instead, I suggest, Odyssey 18 and 19 have a design premised on features that we encounter in medieval narratives, notably retroactive motivation, thematic isolation and suspense about how. The reason why Penelope has provoked innumerous psychologizing interpretations in modern scholarship is that her comportment is not psychologically motivated by Homer. Similar cases of motivation that are bound to strike the reader of modern novels as peculiar can be found in Homer and also later literature. At first sight, these cases may seem to conflict with the emphasis on motivation in Aristotle and the scholia, but in viewing motivation in terms of plot rather than psychology, the critics share common ground with the texts discussed.

The essay discusses the development of literary criticism and its various approaches, such as narrative criticism, reader-response criticism, and ideological criticism. Concepts such the implied author, text, and implied reader are also introduced, providing greater clarity of the principles employed by literary critics engaged in the narrative exegesis of the text.

Molière’s career was punctuated by episodes of polemic. In the twin contexts of an ideological quarrel concerning theatre’s morality and a commercial war between rival theatres, he confronted primarily two types of enemy: the dévots who condemned theatre in general and his rivals who took against his theatre in particular. His private life was attacked as well as his public one (as author, actor and company leader). He was sometimes condemned with disdain as the ‘best farce actor in France’, sometimes with dread as a ‘demon clothed in flesh’. Faced with plots and threats of censorship, Molière shone by his exploitation of these polemical episodes to invent new theatrical forms and confirm his supremacy. From Les Précieuses ridicules to Dom Juan, via L’École des femmes and Tartufe, his entire output can be seen to derive from a conflictual logic, whereby each new play is generated by the debates surrounding the preceding one, in a process of constant negotiation with the legitimising powers whose support he sought: the Parisian public and those with political power. Polemic was thus a driving creative force and laughter became Molière’s most fearful weapon in bringing down his rivals.

Character and plot are inextricably intertwined: characters make plot. Methods of introducing character. Investigating the respective usefulness of ‘showing’ and ‘telling’. A well-drawn character accumulates in the reader’s mind rather than springing fully fledged from the first page. How ‘showing’ character aids the creative process. Individualising characters. A character wants something; motive drives action and action drives plot. The relationship between narrative voice and character. The problems of too many characters. Managing minor characters. Believable characters are not always consistent; characters are fluid and flawed. Over-planning characters can be dangerous, limiting their potential and removing their ability to evolve.

‘For our characters to approach the texture of ""real"" people the writer, as well as the reader, needs to be curious about them, and that is impossible if we have removed their capacity to surprise us.’

Theories about plot structure and the extent of their value. ‘The Seven Basic Plots’ (Christopher Booker). Five-act structure (Gustav Freytag). Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey. Tsvetan Todorov’s five stages of action. The inevitability of plot. Kenn Adams’s story spine. Kurt Vonnegut’s story shapes. ‘Seeding’ conditions in order to make later events believable. The use of more than one timeframe. The risks inherent in confounding reader expectation.

‘You have a broad trajectory for your story when you start writing because you know the beginning and have a sense of an ending, but this trajectory will not be a straight line – the most direct journey from A to Z, where everything goes right, is the least interesting and probably not worth writing about.’

The short story as a way into discussions of plot. The event-plot short story. Synchronised (reader and character) moments of discovery as a key pleasure in fiction. Poetic justice. The relationship of the character to the theme. The Chekhovian / slice-of-life / anti-plot short story. Plot is sidelined as a prime focus in favour of narratives reflective of human experience. Plot and time: plot is only available in retrospect and the location of the reader in – and in relationship to – the narrative defines the meaning of the story. Telling it slant: the usefulness of an indirect route to meaning.

‘Plot may depend not so much on a sequence of events unfolding chronologically as on what the protagonists and the reader know about the events and when they know it.’

This chapter explores what is called a queer racial formalism. The narrative construct analyzed here involves intergenerational family sagas, a queer Asian North American character, and a heritage plot. This chapter investigates three variations of this narrative construct by engaging in short readings of Norman Wong’s Cultural Revolution (1994), Brian Leung’s Lost Men (2007), and Rahul Mehta’s No Other World (2017).

A landmark orients, signals a turning point, indicates a boundary. Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves (1678) was immediately recognized, both by those who disliked it and those who appreciated it, as announcing a new approach to plot structure, representation of society, plausibility (or its lack), and character development. Later the terms ‘psychology’ and ‘analysis’ were used to point to the narrative’s approach to portraying the feelings and thoughts of the protagonist. One of the most obvious ways in which the text distinguishes itself from other novels of its period is its brevity. This quality gives it particular staying-power as a landmark, making it useful in school curricula as an example of the literature of its period—though this use risks skewing the view of seventeenth-century novels by presenting a striking, innovative exception, as the norm. Because landmarks indicate boundaries, they can serve as symbols of the territories they define. La Princesse de Clèves serves today as a marker of the cultural tradition of France itself. It is thus at the centre of debates about the literary canon and of national identity. For both the seventeenth century and for the twenty-first, Lafayette’s work fuels debate.

The white female planter is an understudied figure in Caribbean history and literature. This essay follows the idea of the gendered responsibility to memory using the methodology of feminist rehearsal to examine representations of white women plantation owners in a range of contemporary Caribbean novels. The essay recounts the heated debates among the region’s literary critics and writers around the status of the white woman as author and character, while also looking at the literary characterization of women who had titular (or representative) plantation power and others who owned plantations outright. Most of the novels deploy intertextuality and multiple timelines to recuperate and consciously rehearse experiences missing or invisible in official chronicles. These novels explore the intersectional ideological negotiations that shaped the imperial spaces of the plantation and the lives that were lived within that terrain.

This chapter is prompted by Coetzee’s longstanding interest in stories and storytelling, an interest that is registered across his critical essays and reviews, and thematized in several of his works. Focusing on In the Heart of the Country, The Master of Petersburg, and The Childhood of Jesus, as well as the computer poem ‘Hero and Bad Mother in Epic’, the chapter charts the relationship between the kinds of story that Coetzee has told – generally limited in the scope of their plots and the number of their principal characters – and the forms of narration he has adopted, which vary from the first-person character narration of certain of his early and middle fictions, to the tightly focalized external narration of his later works, to the dialogue-heavy and somewhat affectless narration of the Jesus novels. In each case, it is suggested that the particular form of narration is related to the particular truth with which the work in question seeks to confront its readers.

The Iliad gives a thoroughgoing account of the Trojan War and of war as an inescapable feature of human life through a plot driven by the rage of its central hero Achilles. Achilles’ rage evolves from a bitter conflict within the Achaean camp into a vengeful hatred of the Trojan hero Hector until Achilles succeeds in killing Hector and assuring the fall of Troy; the poem concludes as Achilles accepts his own impending death and makes peace with Hector’s grieving father.

“No Plots for Old Men” argues that aging raised a problem for Charles Dickens’s literary project: the novel’s difficulty of representing temporal continuity over long spans of time. For the old man, the meaningful plots of the nineteenth century—such as the bildungsroman or the marriage plot—are behind him. An object of little narrative interest from the perspective of these plots, the old man is continually activated in Dickens’s novels, setting up a competition between the natural death he staves off and the closure of the narrative in which he is enmeshed. By examining three of Dickens’s early novels, this chapter shows how old men are excluded from the youthful plot of development central to the progress of a modernizing society. No longer the subject of the plot and yet bound by ambition, the elderly male engages in a narrative compulsion that underlines the imaginative power of what has been left behind by both the realist novel and the modernity it represents. By doing so, the old man serves as the site through which Dickens addresses an impasse of the novel form, where its duration is marked by its inability to faithfully represent the texture of passing time.

The third chapter, “Life After the Marriage Plot,” examines how the women of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford preserve a temporal zone from the dual threat of patriarchy and modernization. The late-life romance between Miss Matty and Mr. Holbrook—a marriage plot without the possibility of marriage—generates narrative interest because it follows a set of temporal rules that originate from within Cranford rather than conforming to conventions about age and romantic love from outside the community. The superannuation of persons relates to a similar crisis in the marriage plot, which no longer reflects the experience of the older characters it purports to organize. Thus, I read Cranford’s representation of other forms of media—such as storytelling, the newspaper, and the letter—as a reflection on the formal obsolescence that takes place within the larger narrative economy of the novel. What emerges is a reconceptualization of the utility of what is “old,” insofar as the women of Cranford reterritorialize the obsolete as a particularly feminine challenge to the temporality of modernity.