Talk:Georges Polti

Provenance of The 36 Dramatic Situations
According to Polti, the original manuscript was composed in the 1700s by Italian playwright Count Carlo Gozzi (1720-1806) who analyzed the plots of hundreds of great plays, epic poems, stories from scripture, and even real-life legal proceedings. Gozzi is said to have discovered that only thirty-six possible plots exist among all the world’s stories. Polti writes that the manuscript next went to Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) who painstakingly scrutinized its soundness, before it traveled to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) who also validated its usefulness. While no other independent sources have been located to support of Polti’s provenance for the origin and evolution of “Gozzi’s manuscript,” this text nonetheless constitutes an exceptional contribution to literary theory and criticism.