Thanks to new text-mining techniques, this has now been done. Researchers at the University of Vermont’s Computational Story Lab have analysed over 1,700 English novels to reveal six basic story types – you could call them archetypes – that form the building blocks for more complex stories. They are:
1. Rags to riches – a steady rise from bad to good fortune
2. Riches to rags – a fall from good to bad, a tragedy
3. Icarus – a rise then a fall in fortune
4. Oedipus – a fall, a rise then a fall again
5. Cinderella – rise, fall, rise
6. Man in a hole – fall, rise
Source: BBC – Culture – Every story in the world has one of these six basic plots