Short Story
Short Story - brief prose fiction. The term covers a wide variety of narratives—from stories in which the main focus is on the course of events to studies of character, from the "short short" story to extended and complex narratives such as Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. Most often the short story is restricted in character and situation and is concerned with creating a Read More...
Short Story - brief prose fiction. The term covers a wide variety of narratives—from stories in which the main focus is on the course of events to studies of character, from the "short short" story to extended and complex narratives such as Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. Most often the short story is restricted in character and situation and is concerned with creating a single, dynamic effect. Its length usually falls between 2,000 and 10,000 words. Short stories date back to earliest times; they can be found in the Bible, Gesta Romanorum of the Middle Ages, Boccaccio's Decameron, and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. The modern short story is said to have begun in the 19th cent. with the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Guy de Maupassant. Notable among the exponents of the form are Henry James, O. Henry, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Chekhov, Kafka, D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, Katherine Anne Porter, John O'Hara, Flannery O'Connor, J. D. Salinger, John Cheever, John Updike, Donald Barthelme, and Raymond Carver. See W. Allen, The Short Story in English (1981); G. Weaver, The American Short Story (1983); C. A. Moser, ed., The Russian Short Story (1986); J. Updike and K. Kenison, ed., The Best American Short Stories of the Century (1999). The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright© 2004, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products N.V. All rights reserved. |
Short Story
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A Reader's Companion to the Short Story in English
by Erin Fallon, R. C. Feddersen, James Kurtzleben, Maurice A. Lee, Susan Rochette-Crawley. 432 pgs.
Though many outstanding novels have been written in the last century, most of these novelists have also been short story writers. This reference is a guide to contemporary English-language short story writers and their works. Included are alphabetically arranged entries on roughly 50 writers from around the world, most of whom have been active since 1960. More than half the American writers belong to historically marginalized groups, such as Jewish-Americans, African-Americans, and Asian-Americans, and the volume includes entries for slightly more women than men. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and provides biographical material, a review of criticism, an extended analysis of specific works, and a selected bibliography.
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The Columbia Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Short Story
by Blanche H. Gelfant, Lawrence Graver. 880 pgs.
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The Tales We Tell: Perspectives on the Short Story
by Barbara Lounsberry, Susan Lohafer, Mary Rohrberger, Stephen Pett, R. C. Feddersen. 236 pgs.
The 1990s have seen a renaissance in short fiction studies. This book brings together the opinions, theories, and research of many of today's best-known short story writers, theorists, and critics. It includes essays by leading authors, such as Joyce Carol Oates, John Barth, Robert Coover, Leslie Marmon Silko, Barry Hannah, Gay Talese, and W. P. Kinsella, who reflect on the writing process. The volume traces the origins of the short story back to Chaucer and follows the development of the form through today's "hyper-stories" created interactively in cyberspace. The broad scope of the book covers short stories from around the world, including those from Africa, Australia, Great Britain, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States.
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Postmodern Approaches to the Short Story
by Farhat Iftekharrudin, Joseph Boyden, Joseph Longo, Mary Rohrberger. 156 pgs.
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The Postmodern Short Story: Forms and Issues
by Farhat Iftekharrudin, Joseph Boyden, Mary Rohrberger, Jaie Claudet. 282 pgs.
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Tellers of Tales: 100 Short Stories from the United States, England, France, Russia and Germany
by W. Somerset Maugham . 1572 pgs.
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Tradition and Modernity in the African Short Story: An Introduction to a Literature in Search of Critics
by F. Odun Balogun. 202 pgs.
This pioneering study of the African short story offers a two-part approach to a literary form that has long been neglected by scholars on the continent. Balogun first offers a general survey method and approach for close textual analysis, followed by discussions of two representative writers. The work of Achebe, a traditional realist, and Taban lo Liyong, a post-modernist experimentalist, is examined for general themes and structures. Detailed examinations of Achebe's Girls at War and lo Liyong's Fixions and The Uniformed Man are also included.
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The 70 uncut stories in this collection comprise 36 writers from the United States and 34 from Europe and the Americas. It is an anthology which exemplifies the diversity of writers from the African diaspora.
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Reading the Modern Chinese Short Story
by Marston Anderson, Cyril Birch, Yi-Tsi Mei Feuerwerker, Robert E. Hegel, Leo Ou-Fan Lee, Theodore Huters. 224 pgs.
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