Eucatastrophe

Quick meaning: Eucatastrophe is a noun meaning (narratology) A catastrophe (dramatic event leading to plot resolution) that results in the protagonist's well-being.

Meaning

(narratology) A catastrophe (dramatic event leading to plot resolution) that results in the protagonist's well-being.

Example Sentences

Literary unity demands that once a eucatastrophe happens it must be accepted as part of the story rather than as an arbitrary whim of the author.

Let us hymn the small but journal wonders of Nature and of households, and then finish on a serio-comic note with legends of ultimate eucatastrophe, regeneration beyond the waters.

The "problem" of T[homas] S[tearns] Eliot comes partly from our post-Christian sense of a world where Tolkien's eucatastrophes never happen, and partly from the way we write biography.

But at the story of the little boy (which is a fully attested fact of course) with its apparent sad ending and then its sudden unhoped-for happy ending, I was deeply moved and had that peculiar emotion we all have – though not often. […] For it I coined the word ‘eucatastrophe’: the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears (which I argued it is the highest function of fairy-stories to produce).

Word Forms

• eucatastrophes

Related Words

Related dictionary entries include anticlimax, katharsis, catharsis, catastasis, denouement, finale.

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