These are all good reflections; its never easy to narrow down your textual focus. You just have to pick a way and go with it/justify it. I agree that selecting texts that link to your argument might make more sense than a random selection. Perhaps you could select texts that exhibit different aspects of the flash fiction prototype you identify - I think that's what Gavins does in her study of absurd literature.

I wonder whether prototype theory might be helpful here. It is used a lot in cognitive approaches to genre: the idea that there are 'better' and 'worse' examples of a particular category, and that category members are determined by family resemblances rather than strict in/out criteria, and that categories have fuzzy boundaries so they blend into each other. It may be that you could use some of the vocabulary of prototype theory to explain how flash fiction differs as a category from 'gothic fiction' - which seems to have clearer prototypical features?

Interesting points

Are you aware of work by Jane Lugea and Dan Mcintyre at Huddersfield who also developed some software (called Worldbuilder) that can tag and annotate texts using TWT principles? They discuss it in this article but there may be other publications about it too: link to article The software has mixed reviews from TW theorists... some don't see it as necessary for TWT analysis. I'm not sure how often Worldbuilder is used now.

This is looking much clearer than previous versions and is logically structured - well done!

Good -- perhaps this line of thought can be linked back to the genre theory you introduce in Chapter 2 as well?

'Difficulties' is quite negative - could call it something more positive, or neutral e.g. 'conceptualising flash fiction'??

Insert them here so that you can see how they are returned to and answered through your plan

Test annotation