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:
“When a house is tottering to its fall,
The strain lies heaviest on the weakest part,
One tiny crack throughout the structure spreads,
And its own weight soon brings it toppling down.”
—Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso)
“Women over fifty already form one of the largest groups in the population structure of the western world. As long as they like themselves, they will not be an oppressed minority. In order to like themselves they must reject trivialization by others of who and what they are. A grown woman should not have to masquerade as a girl in order to remain in the land of the living.”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)
“The syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretation and a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)