Dramatic action is crucial to narrative literature of any form or school—and it arrests our attention even in real life. Identifying the principle behind drama, these lectures provide an illuminating new angle from which to view: the importance of conflict to literature; the nature of plot; the difference between Romanticism, Naturalism, and Classicism; the relationship of Ayn Rand's The Romantic Manifesto to Aristotle's Poetics; the meaning of a writer's showing "things as they might be and ought to be"; and how a Romantic writer projects his personal values—as in the plays of Edmond Rostand, which are analyzed in detail.