A History of the American Short Story: Genres – Developments – Model Interpretations. (original) (raw)
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The Classic Short Story, 1870-1925: Theory of a Genre
2014
, and rooted in Hawthorne's "invention" of the genre at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This apparently comprehensive view of the genre, however, left a crucial missing link: critics tend to ignore the end of nineteenth century, despite the fact that this period has a strong claim as a major stage-if not the major stage-of the form. There is of course nothing groundbreaking in such an assertion: it is well documented that the short story was enormously popular at this time, and that innumerable periodicals were publishing countless stories. 4 It was also the time when more masters of the form were active than perhaps at any other time: Chekhov, Guy de Maupassant, Luigi Pirandello, Henry James, Mori Ōgai and Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, to name just a few. 5 The particular form of the genre has also been recognised. In 1985, Clare Hanson reminded us with force that not only was the short story of that time important, but also that it had initiated a whole tradition in itself: the "short story", as opposed to "short fiction". 6 Yet compared to the wealth and importance of these stories in their time, critical appraisals of this form have been very few. 7 The classic short 3 Charles E. May (ed.), Short Story Theories (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1976). The quote is from Charles E. May, "The Nature of Knowledge in Short Fiction", in The New Short Story Theories, ed. by Charles E. May (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1994), pp. 131-43 (p. 133). 4 Between 1885 and 1901 the publication numbers for cheap magazines in the United States went from 3,600 to 7,500. See Andrew Levy, The Culture and Commerce of the American Short Story (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). In Europe, the figures are maybe even more impressive: in Italy alone, about 1,800 periodicals were published in 1891; in France, several papers had a circulation of nearly one million by 1900. On all this, and on the consequences for the form itself, see Part II. 5 Throughout the book, Japanese names will be given following the academic habit of using the surname first followed by the given name. 6 "Throughout this period [1880-1980], despite the development of Symbolist and Modernist short story forms, the 'traditional' tale continued to appear. Indeed, the major point which I wish to make about this period is that it is possible to distinguish in it two quite separate lines of development in the short story".
Short Story World : The Nineteenth-Century American Masters
2003
The advent of the short story in the nineteenth century highlights the fact that writers needed other channels of expression different from the novel in order to pour into them a vision of experience which does not "novelise" life into a chaptered biography of forward (or backward) movement. In America, authors such as Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Harte, Twain or Sarah Orne Jewett looked at brevity as a condition of coherence, a model of intelligibility at odds with the notion that life is a long path which only the novel can fully represent.
Edging Away: The Short Story and the Art of Fiction
2019
Interweaving formalist concerns with the retrieval of conventional literary categories, Sudden Fiction, the anthology of "short short-stories" that hit the American literary scene in the late eighties, provides a good focus for the analysis of the genre's sway between experimentalism and more conventional realistic strategies. These short pieces stand in heretical relationship to postmodernist metafiction and minimalism, engaged as both were in purging fiction from the so-called realistic attachments of character and plot; but the deviation from the postmodernist canon, it is argued, also returns the genre to the basic heretical condition to which it has been doomed by "the dream of the Great American Novel". Women and other eccentric authors, for instances, often fictionalized exclusion by favoring the short story over the novel, co-opting a literary form that from the beginning had been peripheral to the celebrated longer fiction. In our own time, it is fur...
THE EMERGENCE AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY
The short story is one of the oldest forms of literature. Stories have been told as long as man has existed on this planet. We can imagine of early cavemen entertaining each other by telling and listening to stories. The myths, legends, folktales, fairy tales and such like forms are the early manifestations of what later developed into short story. R. C. Fedderson says, "Story it is widely assumed originated somewhere in the misty dawn of language itself (15)." The exact date of the beginning can never be known with any certainty. It would be as useless as "identifying humankind's earliest coherence utterance (15)." But one can certainly assert that the short story is the oldest genre of literature. The fairy tales, fables and legends, which are the basics of all cultures, are so told that their origins cannot be hazarded. But they can certainly be taken as the precursors of the short story as we understand it now.
2009
Edited by three Spanish-speaking scholars with backgrounds respectively in literature, Irish studies and cognitivism, this book aims to approach the short story through a variety of angles by offering contributions from nine leading scholars in the field, including Charles E. May, author of the groundbreaking Short Story Theories (1976). The book opens by highlighting a new impulse in the publication of short stories and a concomitant increase in the academic study of the genre. Insisting on open-mindedness as a prerequisite, the authors set the short story in a global context and aim to go beyond the canonical field of English literature. Naming new fields which have taken up the short story as research material, they mention translation, gender studies, and language-learning (8). The authors also highlight a cognitivist approach among the approaches which are now being used fruitfully. In their view, the short story is an apt medium for demonstrating that 'the literary mind is not a separate kind of mind, it is the fundamental mind, the mind that makes everyday life possible' (8). The editors then detail the book's objectives. Aiming to break new ground, they purport to show and 'organize multiple perspectives and visions on the short story' and to analyze the form 'beyond traditional state of the art critical frameworks' (9), promising both revision and controversy. In this respect, this book can be placed alongside other edited volumes on the genre such as May's The New Short Story Theories (1994)or Per Winther et al's The Art of Brevity: Excursions in Short Fiction Theory and Analysis (2004)or Iftekharuddin et al's The Postmodern Short Story: Forms and Issues (2003). The back cover blurb reminds us that 'making it new' either requires studying new authors or reading established ones with a new perspective. In this regard, the book seeks to provide both approaches, such as modern readings of canonical authors, and introductions to more contemporary authors such as Judith Ortiz Cofer or the graphic novelist Carol Swain.