Popularized in the 1960s by Roland Barthes and others, narratology is the study of narrative, linguistic or otherwise: myths, legends, novels, comic strips, stained-glass windows, psychological case studies.
It employs methods drawn from structuralism, the study of the relations and functions of the internal elements of cultural phenomena.
In James Thurber’s short story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”, mild-mannered Walter Mitty imagines that he is a Navy hydroplane commander flying through a howling storm.
The deepest circle of Hell in Dante’s Inferno is the Ninth Circle. It is where betrayers of their family or country are frozen in ice. There, in the center of the earth, a three-headed Lucifer eats at Judas Iscariot and at Cassius and Brutus, betrayers of Julius Caesar.
Bertolt Brecht follows the general outline of English playwright John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728), but focuses more on social evils in The Threepenny Opera.
Jeeves’s boss was Bertie Wooster, a young man-about-town in P. G. Wodehouse’s stories beginning with My Man Jeeves (1919). Jeeves was his valet.
Maud Gonne did not marry William Butler Yeats, the poet who made the actress famous through his poems of unrequited love. In 1903, after knowing Yeats for fourteen years, Gonne married Major John MacBride, an Irish revolutionary characterized by Yeats as a “drunken, vainglorious lout.” MacBride was executed for his role in the Easter Rebellion…
The interminable law case in Dickens’s Bleak House was Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, a case stemming from a dispute about distribution of an estate.