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Home | Arts & Entertainment | Literature In the history of literary criticism, plot has undergone a variety of interpretations. In the Poetics, Aristotle assigned primary importance to plot (mythos) and considered it the very “soul” of a tragedy. Later critics tended to reduce plot to a more mechanical function, until, in the Romantic era, the term was theoretically degraded to a mere outline on which the content of fiction was hung. Such outlines were popularly thought to exist apart from any particular work and to be reusable and interchangeable. They might be endowed with life by an author through development of character, dialogue, or some other element. The publication of books of “basic plots” brought plot to its lowest esteem. In his great defense of the novel, The Art of Fiction (1884), Henry James politely refuted the prevailing theory of separable elements or ingredients of fiction that could be mixed in proportion like a recipe. “A novel is a living thing, all one and continuous, like any other organism, and in proportion as it lives, will it be found, I think, that in each of the parts there is something of each of the other parts.” He went on to say: “What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?” The wide acceptance of this organic theory of the novel focussed critical attention on what made the work of fiction “live” or “move” and what principle defined or controlled the interaction of character and incident. In the 20th century there have been many attempts to redefine plot as movement, and some critics have even reverted to the position of Aristotle in giving it primary importance in fiction. These neo-Aristotelians (or Chicago school of critics), following the leadership of the critic Ronald S. Crane, have described plot as the author’s control of the reader’s emotional responses—his arousal of the reader’s interest and anxiety and the careful control of that anxiety over a duration of time. This approach, however, is only one of many attempts to restore plot to its former place of priority in fiction. Article Source: http://www.articlewheel.com
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