Beginning with an extended essay that explores the elements of a story and the ways they may be articulated, this collection also comprises a number of pieces in which I have engaged with the same ideas over the last few years. There are two papers delivered at Departmental seminars as my thinking on this subject developed, two studies circulated among interested friends and colleagues, a number of notes mostly published online, and a theoretical investigation of the links between the categories of narrative and other ways in which collocational and lexical meaning has been parsed.

Thanks to all those who have contributed to my thinking, most of all to my son Sam, with whom many of the ideas in these pages have been contested.

If my title is an obvious nod to Propp’s Morfologiya Skazki, it is because that work, more than any other, has spurred me to think about these things.

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