The Modes of Fiction: An Introduction
Taking Aristotle as his starting point, Canadian academic Northrop Frye, in his ground-breaking book Anatomy of Criticism , classifies...
Challenging the Female Template in Fiction: Sarah Jane Smith in 'Doctor Who'
Examining female characters in fiction, one can hardly escape noticing a particular pattern in many of them. Ranging from figures such as...
The Power of Tropes
As we have seen in How Stories Really Work , there are four basic genres, each growing out of the kind of effect a writer wants to...
The Ups and Downs of Characters
If we go back to mythology and folklore, the hero of a story can have superhuman qualities and is often semi-divine in origin - in...
Three Embarrassing Realisations as a Fiction Writer
It seems that there are two broad breeds of fiction writer: those who write, and those who think about being a writer and perhaps...
Northrop Frye: A Form of Words
Canadian Herman Northrop Frye (July 14, 1912 – January 23, 1991) was one of the most influential literary critics and theorists of the...
Symbolism in 'To Kill a Mockingbird'
It's a little known fact to most school students who have to read To Kill a Mockingbird that Harper Lee submitted her manuscript to the...
The Sorrowful State of the Villain
Purely virtuous heroes are hard for us to feel much affinity for. What’s interesting, though, is that as we move away from the complete...