From the time of the Classical era of Greece and Rome, literary theorists have been concerned with the subject of how the plots of stories are organized. In The Poetics, Aristotle put forward the crucial idea that a plot must possess sufficient amplitude to allow a probable or necessary succession of particular actions to produce a significant change in the fortune of the main character. In the early twentieth century, the Russian scholar Vladimir Propp put forward the radical idea that each of the plots in his corpus of a hundred Russian fairy tales consisted of a sequence of 31 functions executed in an identical order. In this way, Propp had provided a workable solution to the mystery of how that 'significant change in the fortune of the main character' might be brought about. In effect, what Propp had done was to discover the first plot genotype, the functional structure or compositional schema of a particular short fiction, the Marriage fairy tale. But Propp was mistaken in his belief that all plots were the same. Although the exact number of plot genotypes is still unclear, this number is not excessively great. Plot genotypes fall into set categories, which means that the analysis of a few important fairy tales will shed light on the way in which most fairy tales - and by extension most short stories and dramatic texts and Hollywood screenplays - are also organized. This study explores the plots of ten fairy tales to lay the foundations for a complete description of the plot genotype.

Terence Patrick Murphy is Full Professor of Rhetoric and Composition in the English Department at Yonsei University, South Korea. He was educated at the University of Toronto and Merton College, Oxford, where he wrote his doctoral dissertation on the history of the little magazine in England. He has published essays in such journals as the Journal of Narrative Technique; Narrative; Language and Literature and Style. His major research interest is the stylistics of the plot in short fiction and film screenplays.

Table of Figures
Preface
Acknowledgements
Note on the Author
Note on the Selection of the Texts
1. The Origins of Plot Analysis
2. Character Theory: from Aristotle to the Cambridge Ritualists
3. Plot Structure: from Aristotle to the Cambridge Ritualists
4. From Veselovskian Motif to Proppian Function
5. A Proppian Analysis of Charles Perrault's Cinderella
6. False and Real Sequences in Ashputtel
7. The Robber Bridegroom: The Limits of Propp's Analysis
8. Fitcher's Bird: A Second Horrific Fairy Tale Genotype
9. The Frog Prince: The Doubled Pivotal Eighth Function
10. Beauty and the Beast: The Irresolute Nineteenth Plot Function
11. Puss-in-Boots: the Character of the Angelic Double
12. Tom-Tit-Tot: The Character of the Diabolic Double
13. Jack and the Beanstalk: The Hero's Journey
14. Little Red Riding Hood: The Defeat of the Heroine in the Struggle
15. The Story of the Three Bears: A Very Short Fairy Tale
16. Conclusion
Appendix 1: The Formal Representation of 'The Fox and the Crow'
Bibliography
Index