Everybody knows what plot is. ‘Readers can tell that two texts are versions of the same story, that a novel and film have the same plot. They can summarize plots and discuss the adequacy of plot summaries. And therefore it seems not unreasonable to ask of literary theory that it provide some account of this notion of plot, whose appropriateness seems beyond question and which we use without difficulty.’

Yet in recent practice such an account of what we understand by ‘plot’ has proved extraordinarily elusive. Narratologists, especially, have been unhappy with the word (and such equivalents as intrigue/intreccio, trame/trama, action, Handlung, Fabel). Some standard textbooks avoid the term altogether (Genette 1980, Bal 1985/1997); others push it to the margins (Prince 1982) or treat it as a casual synonym (Bordwell 1985ab; cf. p. 6 below), while some openly question whether it carries any useful meaning at all (Rimmon-Kenan 1984: 135). To find any extended, unembarrassed discussion of the concept one has to look underground: to the fascinating but rarely acknowledged literary-theoretical ghetto of creative-writing handbooks, with their deviant reception of Aristotle and forbidden fascination with the poetics of authorial composition. It may not be too late to reclaim the word, but the task has been made stiffer by the emergence in the last quarter-century of a widely accepted system of narrative categories in which ‘plot’ plays no recognised role.