- 304 pages
- English
- PDF
- Only available on web
About This Book
Stories engage our emotions. We've known this at least since the days of Plato and Aristotle. What this book helps us to understand now is how our own emotions fundamentally organize and orient stories. In light of recent cognitive research and wide reading in different narrative traditions, Patrick Colm Hogan argues that the structure of stories is a systematic product of human emotion systems. Examining the ways in which incidents, events, episodes, plots, and genres are a function of emotional processes, he demonstrates that emotion systems are absolutely crucial for understanding stories.
Hogan also makes a case for the potentially integral role that stories play in the development of our emotional lives. He provides an in-depth account of the function of emotion within storyâin widespread genres with romantic, heroic, and sacrificial structures, and more limited genres treating parent/child separation, sexual pursuit, criminality, and revengeâas these appear in a variety of cross-cultural traditions. In the course of the book Hogan develops interpretations of works ranging from Tolstoy's Anna Karenina to African oral epics, from Sanskrit comedy to Shakespearean tragedy.
Integrating the latest research in affective science with narratology, this book provides a powerful explanatory account of narrative organization.
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: A Passion for Plot
- 1. Before Stories: Emotional Time and Anna Karenina
- 2. Stories and Works: From Ancient Egypt to Postmodernism
- 3. Universal Narrative Prototypes: Sacrifice, Heroism, and Romantic Love
- 4. Cross-Cultural Minor Genres: Attachment, Lust, Revenge, and Criminal Justice
- Afterword: Stories and the Training of Sensibility
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index