First published in 1999, this volume re-examines narrative design in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Faerie Queene, King Lear and Paradise Lost.

1. Introductory: Reason and Symbolic Bliss. 2. A Mathematical Plot: Plato's Likely Story ... Er, Stories. 3. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: an Unfolded Narrative. 4. 'A Foolish Mad World': The Faerie Queene as Critique of Reason. 5. 'These Late Eclipses': Reason's Primal Scene. 6. Milton Swallows Chaos. 7. Retrospect: but, Narrative is Not Cosmology.