The Natural Laws of Plot - (Alembics: Penn Studies in Literature and Science) by Yoon Sun Lee (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Connecting the history of the novel to the history of science, this book argues that, in the novel from Defoe to Austen and Scott, plot explored alongside natural philosophy the idea of a unified and regular physical world. How do bodies move, stop, or combine? How do things exert force or resist it, decay, or combine with each other? How are natural kinds organized? How can experiences reveal something about the order of the world? Where do human wishing and action belong in it?"--Publisher marketing.

Book Synopsis

Is plot a line, an arc, or a shape? None of these. Rather than thinking of plot as a sequence of events or actions put into place solely through human agency against the backdrop of setting, this book questions why we should distinguish between plot and setting--and indeed, whether we can make such a distinction. After all, plot, Yoon Sun Lee contends, cannot be disentangled from the material setting in which it takes place.

In The Natural Laws of Plot, Lee connects the history of the novel and the history of science to show how plot in the realist novel is given shape by the characteristics of the physical world--and how in turn, plot serves as the avenue through which the realist novel participates in the same lines of inquiry about the world as pursued by the natural and physical sciences. Lee argues that the novel emerges and evolves in tandem with the development of scientific practices and concepts in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe to investigate the idea of a unified and objective world. Drawing on readings from Defoe, Austen, Scott, and many others, Lee demonstrates how bodies, human and non-human, behave according to laws that are built into worlds by plot, and how they are subject to causes and consequences that can occur independently of individual action, social forces, or metaphysical destiny. This interest in representing and exploring how things happen sets the novel apart from other literary genres, and makes the history of science integral to the understanding of the history and theory of the novel, and of narrative.

Plot, Lee shows us, is immersive and powerful, because it satisfies our wish to know how things happen in a coherent, objective, and possibly real world.

Review Quotes

"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] 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"

"[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"

"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"

"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"

About the Author

Yoon Sun Lee is professor of English at Wellesley College.