Finding the Plot: Storytelling in Popular Fictions

Plot, writes Peter Brooks, 'is so basic to our very experience of reading, and indeed to our articulation of experience in general, that criticism has often passed it over in silence.... (Reading for the Plot, xi). Finding the Plot both explores and helps to redress this critical neglect. The book brings together an international group of scholars whose work on popular fiction in the broadest sense - from 'pulp' to fictions that have enjoyed both mass readership and critical esteem - includes a focus on the nature, effects and specific pleasures of consuming stories. It alerts an Anglophone readership to an important and developing body of 'French' work on popular fiction and story, emanating from France, Belgium, Quebec, and the disciplinary field of French Studies, and thanks to its dual-language medium also explicitly addresses French scholars working in the fields of literature and cultural studies. If the central focus is France and francophone culture, the book's scope has a truly global reach; genre fiction, fan fiction, Dan Brown and Stephanie Meyers, like the debates on the power and effects of story that underpin the whole volume, observe no national frontiers. Nor can literary fiction be viewed separately from other genres and media in which stories the transmediality of popular fictions is a recurring theme. The book addresses both the empirical question of which genres and types of text have been and are most 'popular', and the theoretical questions of how plots work, what pleasures they offer to readers, and why it matters that the plot should not be lost.