Structure
Dunn and Morris list several methods that authors use to provide unity to the collection as a whole (the examples are theirs):
- the cycle focuses on a geographical area: The Country of the Pointed Firs, Dubliners, The Women of Brewster Place, Like Water for Chocolate
- the cycle focuses on a central protagonist: Cosmicomics, Winesburg, Ohio, The Woman Warrior, A Certain Lucas
- the cycle features a collective protagonist: In Our Time, Go Down, Moses, Love Medicine, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza
- the cycle uses patterns to create coherence: Three Lives, Exile and the Kingdom, The Golden Apples, A Yellow Raft in Blue Water
- the cycle focuses on story-telling: The Way to Rainy Mountain, Pricksongs & Descants, Lost in the Funhouse, How to Make an American Quilt
Read more about this topic: Short Story Cycle
Famous quotes containing the word structure:
“I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove mightier than ten military divisions.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)
“One theme links together these new proposals for family policy—the idea that the family is exceedingly durable. Changes in structure and function and individual roles are not to be confused with the collapse of the family. Families remain more important in the lives of children than other institutions. Family ties are stronger and more vital than many of us imagine in the perennial atmosphere of crisis surrounding the subject.”
—Joseph Featherstone (20th century)
“Slumism is the pent-up anger of people living on the outside of affluence. Slumism is decay of structure and deterioration of the human spirit. Slumism is a virus which spreads through the body politic. As other “isms,” it breeds disorder and demagoguery and hate.”
—Hubert H. Humphrey (1911–1978)