Harriot Fansler, alumna of Columbia’s English Department, wrote her thesis on “The Evolution of Technique in Elizabethan Tragedy.” Fansler used this as the basis for a more general analysis with her monograph Types of Prose Narratives which she called a “textbook for the story writer.” Fansler warned against the foolhardy and self-defeating idea that writing would, like Athena, spring fully formed from the brain.
“There is a popular misconception, especially in the minds of young people and seemingly in the minds of many teachers and critics of literature, that geniuses have sprung full-worded from the brain of Jove and have worked without antecedents. There could not be to a writer a more cramping idea than that. It is the aim of the present volume to help dispel that illusion, and to set in a convenient form before students of narrative the twofold inspiration mentioned— a feeling for the past and a series of definite problems.”
