Traces the history of the term anagnorisis and explores the ways in which it continues to be a valuable focus for theoretical reflection. Chapters analyze examples of recognition plots from English, French and German literature, and demonstrate how recognition must be viewed as an important topic.

Recognitions is about the most neglected strand of Aristotelian poetics - anagnorisis, or recognition. It is a topic that has conventionally had a bad press: the recognition scene is regarded as an implausible contrivance, a feeble way of resolving a plot the author can no longer control. But why do such scenes occur in every kind of drama and narrative fiction from the Odyssey and Oedipus to thrillers by Le Carre - and how is it they continue to surprise, amuse, and disturb? Terence Cave's book first traces the history of the term anagnorisis and explores the ways in which it continues to be a valuable focus for theoretical reflection. Then, in a series of chapters analysing examples of recognition plots from English, French, and German literature, including Shakespeare, James, Conrad, Racine, Corneille, and Goethe, the book demonstrates how recognition must be seen as a topic of the first importance, perhaps the most strictly literary of all topics in poetics.

Introduction
Odysseus' Scar
I: RECOGNITION IN THE HISTORY OF POETICS: Anagnorisis in antiquity
Renaissance commentaries
The decline of recognition: French neoclassicism
The decline of recognition: Eighteenth-century variants
Plots of the psyche
Modern commentary and criticism
Transition
II: RECOGNITION IN PRACTICE: A Shakespearean prologue
Corneille: the hero versus Oedipus
Between Corneille and Racine: La Thebaide
Racine: after Oedipus
From drama to narrative: Goethe and Kleist
Narrating recognition: Balzac and Dickens
Henry James: the Last Sharpness
Joseph Conrad: the Revenge of the Unknown
Conclusion: Beyond recognition
Translation of verse passages