Product Description: Plotting a story filled with memorable, engaging scenes from beginning to end can feel like an insurmountable challenge. Having the right plan - and the tools to execute it - can make all the difference. Writing Blockbuster Plots pulls back the curtain on story structure with step-by-step strategies and visuals that turn plotting and scene writing into a no-stress endeavor...read more

Product Description: In many fictional narratives, the progression of the plot exists in tension with a very different and powerful dynamic that runs, at a hidden and deeper level, throughout the text. In this volume, Dan Shen systematically investigates how stylistic analysis is indispensable for uncovering this covert progression through rhetorical narrative criticism...read more

Product Description: Equip yourself for the novel-writing journey!Starting a novel is exciting, but finishing it--that's the real challenge. The journey from beginning to end is rife with forks in the road and dead ends that lead many writers off course...read more

Product Description: The author extensively details, analyses and compares key concepts and strategies of fictional worlds theory: a theory which has, over recent years, developed rather rapidly and is connected with leading scholars in the area of literary studies, such as Lubomír Doležel, Umberto Eco, Thomas Pavel, Ruth Ronen, and Marie-Laure Ryan...read more

first edition 1981 copyright

Product Description: This formalist-narratological study of T.F. Powys’ and V.S. Pritchett’s short fiction reestablishes both authors as important contributors to the history of the short story form. It also discusses how writers, who did not belong to the modernist avant-garde innovation, address the problems of the short story form in the twentieth century...read more

The invention of the present-tense novel is a literary event whose importance is on par with the discovery of perspective in painting. From the first novels shaped by interior monologues and the use of the present tense in the tradition of modernism, the present tense has, over the course of its century-long evolution, changed the conditions of fictional narration, along with our conceptions of time in a philosophical and linguistic framework. Indeed, to understand the work of an increasing number of contemporary writers – J.M. Coetzee, Tom McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, to name only a few – it is necessary to both understand the distinct linguistic and literary qualities of the present tense as well as its historical transformation into a genuine tense of contemporary storytelling.For the first time in literary scholarship, Present Tense: A Poetics offers an account of a profound development in 20th- and 21st-century fiction.

Product Description: Critical Approaches to Joseph Conrad is a collection of essays directed to both new and experienced readers of Conrad. The book takes into account recent developments in literary theory, including the prominence of ecocriticism, ecopostcolonial approaches, and gender studies...read more

Product Description: This handbook concisely introduces narrative form to advanced students of fiction. Beginning with a survey of major theorists and approaches, and using clearly defined terms,Narrative Form explains critical vocabulary and offers a variety of strategies for analyzing the formal qualities of fiction...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Anthony Nicholas Twin, known as TNT, parachutes into Russia in order to rescue a top scientist, Dr. Vilunskas, from a Soviet gulag

Product Description: Packed with tips from bestselling and prize-winning authors, Novel Writing: A Writers' and Artists' Companion will give you all the practical advice you need to write and publish your novel. PART 1 provides an introduction to the forms and history of the novel and helps you plan and research your masterpiece, develop characters and compelling narratives and your own authorial voice...read more

Product Description: Fiction - The Art and the Craft is a highly practical exposition of all the major elements of fiction - such as plot, conflict, suspense, the hook, inference, character and dialogue - and how these elements are combined to make a compelling story...read more