A Review of Dramatic Structure in Natsume Soseki’s Botchan and Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s School Days

Abstract

The ancient Greeks believed that poetry and drama were the highest forms of literary art. Aristotle, in Poetics, while attempting to discern between aesthetically pleasing and mediocre literature, analysed contemporary dramatic art to develop the theory of dramatic structure. This structure partitioned the story into different acts, each of which employed plot devices according to the genre being written. Later scholars such as Freytag and Frye elaborated upon theories of structure and applied them to prose writing. As a result, narrative, or dramatic, structure became a template for writing genre fiction. This paper analyses the dramatic structure of two works of prose from the school story genre, Botchan and Tom Brown’s School Days. It discusses the development of structure and applies the theory to establish how differing structure can influence narrative storytelling within the genre.