‘Plot’ is an unloved word in narrative theory: no longer quite the fourletter vulgarity it was to critics a generation or two ago, but still not much used in polite conversation. Largely bypassed by narratology, it remains for many theorists a suspect term, worryingly slippery to define, and tangled up with lines of theory that have not fared well in the history of postwar criticism. Part I of this book tries to soothe these suspicions, arguing for the rehabilitation of ‘plot’ as a central term of narrative theory, and putting forward a model that seeks to repair the difficulties felt in definitions and analyses from Aristotle on. With the help of ideas borrowed from narratology and cognitive science, I argue that the vernacular notion of plot is anything but a disposable and methodologically suspect abstraction – that, on the contrary, it marks an attempt to describe a fundamental component of the mental machinery we use in the construction and reading of fiction.

But this is not centrally a work of theory. Part II is historical and textspecific, and the theoretical model proposed in Chapters 1–4 is there chiefly to make such a history writable. Rather, however, than a ‘history of plot’ in general – something nobody, let alone a classicist, would be easily persuaded to take on – it seeks to track the emergence of one very particular kind of plotting, which has held a position of extraordinary dominance in the traditions of Western literature for close on three millennia.