What accounts for the power of stories to both entertain us and interpret our world? This question has compelled the attention of storytellers and students of literature alike-particularly in recent decades-and their answers have opened an important window on larger questions about the nature of culture, as well as of interpretation and understanding. This second edition of Essentials of the Theory of Fiction provides a comprehensive view of the theory of fiction from the nineteenth century, through modernism and postmodernism, to the present. Expanded and revised, it has new selections from contemporary theorists, including Henry Louis Gates Jr., Peter Brooks, Linda Hutcheon, David Lodge, Barbara Foley, and others.

1. Henry James: The Art of Fiction
2. Virginia Woolf: Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown
3. E. M. Forster: Flat and Round Characters
4. M. M. Bakhtin: Epic and Novel
5. Joseph Frank: Spatial Form in Modern Literature
6. Lionel Trilling: Manners, Morals, and the Novel
7. Roland Barthes: Writing and the Novel
8. Norman Friedman: What Makes a Short Story Short?
9. Wayne Booth: Distance and Point of View - An Essay in Classification
10. Georg Lukacs: Marxist Aesthetics and Literary Realism
11. J. Arthur Honeywell: Plot in the Modern Novel
12. Mitchell A. Leaska: The Concept of Point of View
13. William H. Gass: The Concept of Character in Fiction
14. Gerard Genette: Time and Narrative in A la recherche du temps perdu
15. William Freedman: The Literary Motif - A Definition and Evaluation
16. Gerald Prince: Introduction to the Study of the Narratee
17. George Levine: Realism Reconsidered
18. Seymour Chatman: Discourse - Nonnarrated Stories
19. Tzvetan Todorov: Reading as Construction
20. John Barth: The Literature of Replenishment
21. Suzanne C. Ferguson: Defining the Short Story: Impressionism and Form
22. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: The Blackness of Blackness - A Critique on the Sign and the Signifying Monkey
23. Peter Brooks: Reading for the Plot
24. David Lodge: Mimesis and Diegesis in Modern Fiction
25. Rachel Blau DuPlessis: Breaking the Sentence - Breaking the Sequence
26. Barbara Foley: The Documentary Novel and the Problem of Borders
27. Patrocinio P. Schweickart: Reading Ourselves - Toward a Feminist Theory of Readings
28. Joanne S. Frye: Politics, Literary Form, and a Feminist Poetics of the Novel
29. Susan S. Lanser: Toward a Feminist Narratology
30. Linda Hutcheon: "The Pastime of Past Time" - Fiction, History, Historiographical Metafiction