Plot Summary – Page 3 – Interesting Literature

The Tempest: A Short Plot Summary of Shakespeare’s Play

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

The Tempest is one of Shakespeare’s most enchanting and enchanted plays: a fantasy or ‘romance’ featuring a magician, the ‘monstrous’ offspring of a wicked witch, fairies, a lavish masque, drunken conspirators, young lovers, and much else.

Before we say more about these individual elements (which demand separate blog posts at some later date), it might be worth offering a brief summary of The Tempest – one of Shakespeare’s shortest plays, and widely regarded as his ‘farewell to the theatre’.

‘After the Race’: A Summary of the James Joyce Short Story

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

What follows is a short plot summary of James Joyce’s story ‘After the Race’, which was published in his 1914 collection of short stories, Dubliners. Before proceeding to the summary below, you might wish to read ‘After the Race’ here.

‘Monday or Tuesday’: A Summary of the Virginia Woolf Short Story

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Monday or Tuesday’ appeared in Virginia Woolf’s 1921 collection of short stories, a collection which took its name, Monday or Tuesday, from this story. But can we really call a short sketch (just a page long in the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Woolf’s short fiction) without any discernible plot a ‘short story’? Before we address such questions, it’s worth considering what actually happens in Woolf’s story, which can be read here.

‘The Masque of the Red Death’: A Summary of Poe’s Short Story

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Among Edgar Allan Poe’s most famous tales, ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ is one of the shortest. In just a few pages, Poe paints a powerful picture of a luxurious masked ball, which is then interrupted and ultimately destroyed by the presence of a mysterious figure. You can read ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ here before proceeding to our summary of the story below.

Interesting Facts about Dickens’s A Christmas Carol

The surprising story behind Dickens’s A Christmas Carol Charles Dickens’s classic Christmas tale A Christmas Carol was published over 170 years ago, in 1843. Since then, there have been countless stage, screen, and radio adaptations of the classic story. The first film adaptation was a short silent movie version in 1901, titled Scrooge; or, Marley’s Ghost. There have … Read more