14.1 Criticism, narratology and theory
- Aristotle. Poetics. c. 335 BCE. Available in Classical Literary Criticism, translated by Penelope Murray and T. S. Dorsch. London: Penguin, 2000.
- Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Translated by Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974. [French original 1970.]
- Barthes, Roland. “The Reality Effect.” In The Rustle of Language, translated by Richard Howard. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986. [French original 1968.]
- Benjamin, Walter. “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov.” 1936. In Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1968.
- Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984.
- Chatman, Seymour. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978.
- DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985.
- Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel. London: Edward Arnold, 1927.
- Forster, John. The Life of Charles Dickens. London: Chapman and Hall, 1872–74. [The source of the cancelled ending of Great Expectations in general circulation.]
- Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. 1920. [Cited as mediated by Brooks.]
- Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980. [For amorce, and for anachrony.]
- Genette, Gérard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. [For apparatus and appendices as thresholds.]
- James, Henry. Prefaces to the New York Edition, collected as The Art of the Novel, edited by R. P. Blackmur. New York: Scribner, 1934. [Cited: the preface to Roderick Hudson.] The essay “The Art of Fiction” (1884), collected in Partial Portraits (1888), is the source of the “distribution at the last of prizes, pensions, husbands, wives, babies, millions”, which the first edition attributed to the preface to The Portrait of a Lady.
- Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967.
- Miller, D. A. Narrative and Its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981.
- Rabinowitz, Peter J. Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987.
- Rosenberg, Edgar, ed. Great Expectations. Norton Critical Edition. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. [For the textual history of the endings.]
- Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968.
- Torgovnick, Marianna. Closure in the Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981.
14.2 Cognitive and empirical studies
- Asch, Solomon E. “Forming Impressions of Personality.” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 41, no. 3 (1946): 258–290. [Cited as the primacy counterpart to recency.]
- Gerrig, Richard J. Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activities of Reading. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.
- Kahneman, Daniel, Barbara L. Fredrickson, Charles A. Schreiber, and Donald A. Redelmeier. “When More Pain Is Preferred to Less: Adding a Better End.” Psychological Science 4, no. 6 (1993): 401–405.
- Murdock, Bennet B., Jr. “The Serial Position Effect of Free Recall.” Journal of Experimental Psychology 64, no. 5 (1962): 482–488.
- Redelmeier, Donald A., and Daniel Kahneman. “Patients’ Memories of Painful Medical Treatments: Real-Time and Retrospective Evaluations of Two Minimally Invasive Procedures.” Pain 66, no. 1 (1996): 3–8.
14.3 Craft literature and documents of practice
- Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel (1927) — see §14.1; cited here for the remark on death and marriage as the novelist’s available conclusions.
- James, Henry. The Art of the Novel (1934) — see §14.1; the most useful practitioner’s statement on the artificiality of closure.
- Trollope, Anthony. Barchester Towers. 1857. [Cited for the narrator’s aside on the difficulty of the novelist’s final duty.]
14.4 Primary texts discussed
Endings are quoted briefly for the purposes of criticism and study. Where a work was not written in English, the translation used is named.
- Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. 1958.
- Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. 1985.
- Austen, Jane. Emma. 1815; Pride and Prejudice. 1813.
- Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. 1847; Villette. 1853.
- Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. 1847.
- Camus, Albert. L’Étranger. 1942. English versions cited: trans. Stuart Gilbert (1946); trans. Matthew Ward (1988); trans. Sandra Smith (2012).
- Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quixote. Part I 1605; Part II 1615. Trans. Edith Grossman (2003).
- Christie, Agatha. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. 1926.
- Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. 1853; Great Expectations. 1861 (serial), 1862 (one-volume edition, with the altered final sentence).
- Eliot, George. Middlemarch. 1871–72.
- Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. 1929.
- Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. 1925.
- Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary. 1857.
- Forster, E. M. A Passage to India. 1924.
- Fowles, John. The French Lieutenant’s Woman. 1969.
- Gay, John. The Beggar’s Opera. 1728.
- Ishiguro, Kazuo. The Remains of the Day. 1989.
- Joyce, James. Ulysses. 1922.
- Kafka, Franz. Der Process. 1925; Das Schloss. 1926.
- McEwan, Ian. Atonement. 2001.
- Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. 1851.
- Morrison, Toni. Beloved. 1987.
- Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. 1949. [Including the Appendix, “The Principles of Newspeak”.]
- Saramago, José. Blindness. 1995. Trans. Giovanni Pontiero (1997).
- Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. 1818.
- Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. 1939.
- Tolstoy, Leo. Anna Karenina. 1878; The Death of Ivan Ilyich. 1886; War and Peace. 1869.
- Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 1884.
- Weill, Kurt, and Bertolt Brecht. Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera). 1928.
- Woolf, Virginia. Mrs Dalloway. 1925; To the Lighthouse. 1927.
14.5 Second-edition sources
The second edition’s Core chapter adds the following works. Each factual claim about them was checked by a narrow lookup; the source of each check is recorded in the book’s examples register.
- Donoghue, Emma. Room. 2010.
- Ishiguro, Kazuo. Never Let Me Go. 2005.
- Picoult, Jodi. My Sister’s Keeper. 2004. Film adaptation dir. Nick Cassavetes, 2009, with a reversed ending.
- Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. 2007. The epilogue, “Nineteen Years Later”.
- The Sopranos. “Made in America” (season 6, episode 21). Written and directed by David Chase. HBO, 10 June 2007.
- Six Feet Under. “Everyone’s Waiting” (season 5, episode 12). Written and directed by Alan Ball. HBO, 21 August 2005.