Composition

Composition is the construction of a literary work — the purposeful arrangement and interconnection of all its parts, images, episodes, and scenes that ensure the integrity, harmony, and expressiveness of the whole. Composition embraces plot and extra-plot elements, the system of images, the alternation of narrative planes, the proportions of the parts, and the devices of opening and ending. One distinguishes linear composition (events given in chronological order), retrospective, ring (the work ends by returning to the initial image), mirror, parallel, and framed composition. A thought-out composition is subordinated to the ideational design and heightens the artistic effect. Models of accomplished composition are Lesia Ukrainka's drama The Forest Song with its succession of the seasons, Lina Kostenko's verse novel Marusia Churai, the novellas of Vasyl Stefanyk with their terse, dramatically tense structure, and, in world literature, the tragedies of the ancient Greek authors and the novels of Leo Tolstoy.