Literary thought makes everyday thought possible. Parable-the projection of story to give meaning to new encounters-is the indispensable tool of everyday reason. Story is the central principle of our experience and knowledge. The literary mind-the mind of stories and parables-is not peripheral but basic to thought. But Mark Turner argues that this common wisdom is wrong. We think of stories and parables from Aesop's Fables or The Thousand and One Nights, for example, as exotic tales set in strange lands, with spectacular images, talking animals, and fantastic plots-wonderful entertainments, often insightful, but well removed from logic and science, and entirely foreign to the world of everyday thought. Certainly we do not think it is the basis of the mind. We usually consider literary thinking to be peripheral and dispensable, an activity for specialists: poets, prophets, lunatics, and babysitters. © 2008 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. Dannenberg's original investigation of plot patterns is interdisciplinary, incorporating research from narrative theory, cognitive approaches to literature, social psychology, possible worlds theory, and feminist approaches to narrative. In highlighting critical stages in the historical development of narrative fiction, the study produces new readings of works by pinpointing the innovative role played by particular authors in this evolutionary process. The study's rich historical and textual scope reveals how narrative traditions and genres such as romance and realism or science fiction and historiographic metafiction, rather than being separated by clear boundaries are in fact in a continual process of interaction and cross-fertilization. These two key plot strategies are constructed around pivotal moments when characters' life trajectories, or sometimes the paths of history, converge or diverge.

Dannenberg proposes a new, multidimensional theory for analyzing time and space in narrative fiction, then uses this theory to trace the historical evolution of narrative fiction by focusing on coincidence and counterfactuality.

Using plot theory to chart the development of narrative fiction from the Renaissance to the present, Dannenberg demonstrates how the novel has evolved over time and how writers have developed increasingly complex narrative strategies that tap into key cognitive parameters familiar to the reader from real-life experience. While plot is among the most integral aspects of storytelling, it is perhaps the least studied aspect of narrative. Dannenberg sets out to answer the perennial question of how to tell a good story. In Coincidence and Counterfactuality, a groundbreaking analysis of plot, Hilary P.

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