Do the commonalities of stories cluster into big masterplots? If so, how many? Going all the way back to Aristotle, literary critics have wrestled with the question, how many “big umbrella” plots do you need to cover all narratives? Will three or four suffice? Or maybe seven? Fourteen? Thirty-six? All these have been proposed by one critic or another. Alternatively, is there maybe one mega-plot from which we can derive all the others?
