The Seven Basic Plots

This remarkable and monumental book at last provides a comprehensive answer to the age-old riddle of whether there are only a small number of 'basic stories' in the world. Using a wealth of examples, from ancient myths and folk tales via the plays and novels of great literature to the popular movies and TV soap operas of today, it shows that there are seven archetypal themes which recur throughout every kind of storytelling.
But this is only the prelude to an investigation into how and why we are 'programmed' to imagine stories in these ways, and how they relate to the inmost patterns of human psychology. Drawing on a vast array of examples, from Proust to detective stories, from the Marquis de Sade to E.T., Christopher Booker then leads us through the extraordinary changes in the nature of storytelling over the past 200 years, and why so many stories have 'lost the plot' by losing touch with their underlying archetypal purpose.
Booker analyses why evolution has given us the need to tell stories and illustrates how storytelling has provided a uniquely revealing mirror to mankind's psychological development over the past 5000 years.
This seminal book opens up in an entirely new way our understanding of the real purpose storytelling plays in our lives, and will be a talking point for years to come.

Christopher Booker writes for the Sunday Telegraph and is the bestselling author of The Seven Basic Plots, The Real Global Warming Disaster, The Great Deception and Scared to Death (all published by Bloomsbury Continuum). He has been an author and journalist for nearly 50 years, and was the founding editor of the satirical magazine Private Eye.

Part 1: Why Do We Tell Stories?
Chapter 1 - Overcoming the Monster - Beowulf - Red Riding Hood - Jaws
Chapter 2 - The Thrilling Escape from Death - The Pit and the Pendulum - Jonah - Journal of the Plague Year
Chapter 3 - Rags to Riches - The Ugly Duckling - Jane Eyre - The Gold Rush (Chaplin)
Chapter 4 - The Quest - The Odyssey - Exodus - The Aeneid - Moby Dick - Babar and Father Christmas
Chapter 5 - Voyage and Return - Alice in Wonderland - Peter Pan - Rasselas - The Third Man - Orpheus and Eurydice
Chapter 6 - Comedy - Aristophanes (The Wasps) - Plautus (The Pot of Gold) - Shakespeare (Love's Labours Lost, The Comedy of Errors etc) - Moliere (Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme) - Sheridan (The School for Scandal)
Chapter 7 - Comedy: The Plot Disguised - Fielding (Tom Jones) - Austen (Pride and Prejudice) - P.G Wodehouse - South Pacific - Four Weddings and a Funera
Chapter 8 - Tragedy Icarus - Macbeth - Don Giovanni - Anna Karenina - Bonnie and Clyde
Chapter 9 - Tragedy: The Divided Self
Chapter 10 - Tragedy: The Hero As Monster - Richard III - Dr Jekyll
Chapter 11 - Tragedies of Redemption and Fulfilment - King Lear - Tannhauser - Samson - The Snow Goose
Chapter 12 - From Shadow Into Light
Part 2: The Complete Happy Ending
Chapter 13 - The Dark Figures - Crocodile Dundee
Chapter 14 - Seeing Whole - The Jewel In the Crown
Chapter 15 - The Perfect Balance
Chapter 16 - The Unrealised Value
Chapter 17 - The Archetypal Family Drama
Chapter 18 - The Light Figures
Chapter 19 - Reaching the Goal - The Magic Flute - Lord of the Rings -Harry Potter
Chapter 20 - The Fatal Flaw
Part 3: Missing the Mark
Chapter 21 - Enter the Dark Inversion - Pere Goriot - Moby Dick
Chapter 22 - The Ego Takes Over: The Dark and Sentimental Versions - My Fair Lady - James Bond - Star Wars
Chapter 23 - The Ego Takes Over II Clarissa - Kafka - Catcher in the Rye
Chapter 24 - The Ego Takes Over III - Traviata - Tosca - Dorian Gray -You Only Live Twice
Chapter 25 - Losing the Plot - Thomas Hardy A Case History
Chapter 26 - Going Nowhere - Chekhov - Proust - Tender is the Night - Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Chapter 27 - Why Sex and Violence? Sade - Ulysses - Last Exit to Brooklyn - A Clockwork Orange
Chapter 28 - Rebelllion Against the One Job - 1984
Chapter 29 - The Mystery - Murders in the Rue Morgue - Sherlock Holmes - Citizen Kane
Chapter 30 - The Riddle of the Sphinx - Sophocles - Hamlet