Book Review: Jennifer J. Smith, The American Short Story Cycle (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh UP, 2018, 194 p.) (original) (raw)
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The short story cycle offers a pertinent example of a nomadic genre. Because it resists definition, it inhabits a liminal space straddling the short story and the novel. This essay focuses both on the agency of genre in shaping literary texts and on its capacity to be the receptacle of specific cultural and political concerns.
A History of the American Short Story: Genres – Developments – Model Interpretations.
This handbook aims to provide students, teachers, and other readers with a concise survey of the American short story from its early beginnings to the first decade of the 21st century. At the same time, it critically reflects the many intricacies and problems involved in the writing of literary history and canon formation. In contrast to the many introductions to the American short story that focus primarily on individual authors, the order of contributions is based roughly on the diachronic sequence of what can be considered as the major eras of the genre, with the emphasis on the dominant thematic and formal developments of the time. The chapters offer a series of introductions to the major (sub-)genres as well as model interpretations of stories that serve as paradigm examples of these (sub-)genres. They thus present a broad overview of key periods, genres, and writers as well as in-depth analyses of selected stories. Moreover, both the volume as a whole and the individual chapters attempt to provide students with a large collection of texts, topics, and analytical techniques that can be adopted and expanded in the process of exam preparation. The authors discussed in this volume include such ‘classic’ short story writers as Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ernest Hemingway, and Eudora Welty as well as contemporary authors such as Bharati Mukherjee, Simon Ortiz, Nicole Krauss, and many others.
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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.
Anglia, 2018
The fourth volume of the highly acclaimed Handbooks of English and American Studies series (2015-) is dedicated to the American novel of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Staying true to the series editors' stated aim of "combining theory with text analysis and contextual anchoring" (v), Timo Müller, the volume editor, has compiled an impressive collection of articles from twenty-nine contributors and framed them with an informative introduction of his own. The handbook is composed of two parts: Part I is entitled "Systematic Questions" and its seven chapters cover the broad theoretical and historical aspects of modernism, postmodernism, cultural diversity, intermediality, inter-American perspectives, the marketplace of the American novel and the futures of the American novel; Part II is devoted to exemplary "Close Readings" of twenty-two canonical American novels that range from Henry James's The Ambassadors (1903) to Louise Erdrich's The Round House (2012). Other authors discussed include Faulkner, Steinbeck, Wright, Ellison, Pynchon, Silko, Cisneros and Roth, to name just a few. Together, these thirty chapters merge into an excellent work of reference for everyone interested in American studies. The Handbook of the American Novel of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries starts with Timo Müller's introduction, in which he traces an "uneasy relationship between the nation and the novel in the United States" (1). Noting that the genre of the novel has been entangled with problematic conceptions of national and cultural identity, Müller also highlights its historical role in critiquing and defying these same notionsespecially since the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960 s. Other ubiquitous topics found in American novels are processes of industrialization and modernization, which gained momentum at the end of the nineteenth and especially at the beginning of the twentieth century. The resulting emergence of mass culture and new media problematized the relationship between highbrow and lowbrow, forcing the genre of the novel to reposition itself on this spectrum and, moreover, to subvert it. This became especially programmatic during the era of postmodernism, which Müller associates, for example, with the key idea of "the self as construct" as opposed to
Module Convener, AM-113 Introduction to American Literature and Culture [Swansea University, 2016]
Introduction to American Literature and Culture "This module offers an interdisciplinary survey of American literature and culture from the Nineteenth century to the present day, examining the construction of a specifically American identity in relation to the sweeping social, technological and economic changes which characterize the American experience. The module as a whole explores American culture and literature in a lively and interdisciplinary manner, reading the search for an American Self as an attempt to come to terms with the bewildering transformation of the world, and the position of the individual within it." Reading List 2016: * Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Emma Lazarus, Melvin Tolson, Sandra Cisneros [selected poems and extracts for introductory lecture] * Edgar Allan Poe - 'The Fall of the House of Usher & Other Stories' [various short stories, Gothic fiction] * Willa Cather - 'My Antonia' [modernism, regionalism] * Mark Twain - 'Huckleberry Finn' [Southern literature, racial politics, vernacular style] * Emily Dickinson [various poems, modernism] * John Dos Passos - 'Manhattan Transfer' [modernism, the city, urban space, cinema, advertising, industrial age] * Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Stirling A. Brown [selected poems as part of 'Harlem Renaissance'] * Don DeLillo - 'White Noise' [postmodernism, simulara, mass media, waste, history]"
Hayes, Kevin J. 2012: A Journey Through American Literature
Atlantis Journal of the Spanish Association For Anglo American Studies, 2013
Unless you are a hobo and hop a freight train to wherever it takes you, a 'journey' means an itinerary, which means a series of choices of destinations and an organization of possibilities: how long to linger, what to report, what photos to keep and to share with your friends, what souvenirs to buy. Inevitably your choices would not necessarily be mine, but nor do personal preferences (and a somewhat idiosyncratic selection) mean that the journey is less interesting. Kevin J. Hayes' decision to organize his journey through American Literature not by the traditional chronology or diff erent movements but by genre and by theme is full of pitfalls, yet even these challenges give us a new way to approach and a diff erent sense of understanding of the 'journey'. In a more straightforward chronology one can examine the specifi c socio-historical moment within which to explore each literary text as a response to that era, as a cultural production of its time. Choosing a 'thematic' approach is tenuous: what themes are consistent? How do diff erent authors develop them? What happens if themes are mixed within one text? Even considering all these possible limitations, Hayes' personal Journey is oft en interesting and a lot of fun. In spite of, or perhaps even because of, the problematics of his selection, there is a wealth of information here, particularly for an instructor of American Literature who wants to teach a course on, say, 'travel literature' , or for the graduate student reading widely in order to decide on focus and familiarize him/herself with the multitude of possibilities. For the less well-versed, however, the selections and focus are not always useful as an overview. Sometimes trying to make a general statement about a variety of very diff erent works leads the author into diffi culties. Each of the eight diff erent chapters are subdivided into various sections and, although what is included in each section is sometimes arbitrary, a fairly inclusive index makes it somewhat easier to read for content and specifi c writers or their works. Chapter 1, 'Beginnings' , piques the reader's interest by citing the 'Opening Lines' of many of our major writers. And we may confi dently agree with the author when he asserts that "American literature is about identity. .. [and] there may be no general theme more prevalent in it or more pertinent to it" (3). Yet Hayes is on more slippery ground when he asserts on page six that "[i]n the United States, the expression of individuality is