Short Story Theories: A Twenty-First-Century Perspective problematizes different aspects of the renewal and development of the short story. The aim of this collection is to explore the most recent theoretical issues raised by the short story as a genre and to offer theoretical and practical perspectives on the form. Centering as it does on specific authors and on the wider implications of short story poetics, this collection presents a new series of essays that both reinterpret canonical writers of the genre and advance new critical insights on the most recent trends and contemporary authors. Theorizations about genre reflect on different aspects of the short story from a multiplicity of perspectives and take the form of historical and aesthetic considerations, gender-centered accounts, and examinations that attend to reader-response theory, cognitive patterns, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, postcolonial studies, postmodern techniques, and contemporary uses of minimalist forms. Looking ahead, this collection traces the evolution of the short story from Chaucer through the Romantic writings of Poe to the postmodern developments and into the twenty-first century. This volume will prove of interest to scholars and graduate students working in the fields of the short story and of literature in general. In addition, the readability and analytical transparence of these essays make them accessible to a more general readership interested in fiction.

This work is a collection of short stories that explores the evolution of the short story form from ancient times to modern literature. It includes stories by a wide range of authors, from Petronius and Boccaccio to Paul Morand. It is an essential read for anyone interested in the history and evolution of literature. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Brief biographical sketches of the authors included.

From the mid-nineteenth century through at least the first half of the twentieth, the southern code of appropriate feminine behavior required that women depend on sources outside themselves for sustenance, direction, and expression. The chivalric ideal that placed the southern lady on a pedestal often created within her gracious and gentle exterior a turmoil of frustration, confusion, and resentment. This concept of upper middle-class, white southern womanhood forms an important part of the imaginative expression of the southern women writers whose works and lives form the subject matter of this book. All seven—Augusta Jane Evans, Grace King, Kate Chopin, Mary Johnston, Ellen Glasgow, Frances Newman, and Margaret Mitchell—were themselves products of this genteel tradition. Anne Goodwyn Jones explains that her aim is not to link biography and art but to seek, in the lives and works of these seven southern women writers, common patterns that can lead to ways to discern the mind of the southern lady. Tomorrow Is Another Day shows that, by writing themselves and their characters into being, by expressing their voices—however variant in tone—“these seven writers wrote themselves into another day.”