Natural Laws of Plot

Yoon Sun Lee is professor of English at Wellesley College.

"The Natural Laws of Plot adds to a growing slate of new materialist accounts of the eighteenth century and of the novel, yet it does so in a way that excitingly resuscitates plot—too often ignored or reduced to mere human action at the exclusion of the uncountable actions and reactions of the world. In grounding plot in the eighteenth century's evolving notion of objectivity, Lee offers a fresh and convincing perspective on the capaciousness and complexity of plot." (Eighteenth-Century Fiction) "[An] impressive book...In its scope, its research, its originality, it is an important paving stone, so to speak, in our understanding of the novel. Lee's book disarticulates plot from narrative and character, but she does not leave us with a macerated skeleton: plot is fused, living, into description and motion, matter and space, shaped by the forces that were seen shaping the (shall we say it?) real world." (Modern Philology) "Yoon Sun Lee argues for a new understanding of plot. We generally think of plot as what happens in a novel—as a series of events and their causes and consequences. We furthermore tend to see it as a free-standing structure: we believe that it can be extrapolated from the rest of the novel, isolated and examined as an independent entity. This, Lee points out, gives plot a kind of 'objective' quality: the move from potential and possibility to something that 'actually' takes place enacts a shift, a de-personalization. Now there is a 'what happened,' and this labor of enclosure and selection produces an ineluctable sense of independent existence. The recognition of this quality, and the examination of how it is produced, is the first of the book's brilliant interventions into our understanding of plot....Lee [has] given us a tremendous gift." (Eighteenth-Century Studies) "[An] ingenious study...Lee shows herself well versed in contemporary narratology, but in developing this counter-history of plot, she sets to one side the uses of contemporary cognitive psychology for analyzing how plots are recognized and valued. Instead, she works in a historicistmode, explaining how a whole series of scientific models informed the thought experiments proffered by realist fiction...[O]ur histories and theories of the British novel, of realism, of plot, and of literature and science will stand greatly enriched by this study, to which all those working in those broad and interconnected fields should attend." (The Wordsworth Circle) "Ambitiously conceived and persuasively argued, The Natural Laws of Plot shows how, over a crucial century or more of British and Irish fiction, developments in experimental science came to shape the representation of action in the realist novel." (James Chandler, University of Chicago)