Postmodernism, as a mode of the contemporary short story, has been clearly established and recognized by short story theorists. But postmodern theory, as pervasive as it has become among academics in the last half century, has scarcely been applied to the short story genre in particular. Many contemporary scholars, nonetheless, are currently making use of certain postmodern thematic approaches to help them determine meanings of particular short stories. T Short story theory began with Edgar Allan Poe's review of Twice-Told Tales, a collection of stories by his contemporary, Nathaniel Hawthorne. But theoretical discussions of the short story languished until modernism and the new criticism provided impetus for further development. Surprisingly, though, the next large critical movement, postmodernism, failed to address the short story as a genre. But while there is little postmodern theory concerning the short story, contemporary scholars have used certain postmodern critical approaches to help determine meaning. This book demonstrates the effect of postmodern theory on the study of the short story genre. The expert contributors to this volume examine such topics as genre and form, the role of the reader, cultural and ethnic diversity, and feminist perspectives on the short story. In doing so, they apply postmodern theoretical approaches to international short stories, be they in the traditional mode, the modern mode, or the postmodern mode. The volume looks at fiction by Edith Wharton, Henry James, Katherine Mansfield, and other authors, and at Iranian short fiction, the postcolonial short story, the fantastic in short fiction, and other subjects.

How can the short story help to redefine modernism, postmodernism and their interrelationship? What is the status of the short story in modern literary history? These are the central questions that the essays collected in this volume try to answer from different perspectives through readings of short fiction in English and accounts of the genre’s theorisations. The essays by a group of international scholars tackle theoretical issues that are central in approaches to both “movements” such as periodisation, autonomy, high vs. popular literature, totality vs. fragmentation, surface vs. depth, otherness, representation, and, above all, the subject and its vicissitudes. Because it blends theory-based arguments into the approaches to the short fiction of mainly canonical authors (Joyce, Woolf, Lewis, Ballard, Carter, Rushdie, or Wallace), Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Short Story in English is of interest not only to readers and scholars of the short story, but also to those coming from the fields of literary theory and literary history.

Postmodernism, as a mode of the contemporary short story, has been clearly established and recognized by short story theorists. But postmodern theory, as pervasive as it has become among academics in the last half century, has scarcely been applied to the short story genre in particular. Many contemporary scholars, nonetheless, are currently making use of certain postmodern thematic approaches to help them determine meanings of particular short stories. T Short story theory began with Edgar Allan Poe's review of Twice-Told Tales, a collection of stories by his contemporary, Nathaniel Hawthorne. But theoretical discussions of the short story languished until modernism and the new criticism provided impetus for further development. Surprisingly, though, the next large critical movement, postmodernism, failed to address the short story as a genre. But while there is little postmodern theory concerning the short story, contemporary scholars have used certain postmodern critical approaches to help determine meaning. This book demonstrates the effect of postmodern theory on the study of the short story genre. The expert contributors to this volume examine such topics as genre and form, the role of the reader, cultural and ethnic diversity, and feminist perspectives on the short story. In doing so, they apply postmodern theoretical approaches to international short stories, be they in the traditional mode, the modern mode, or the postmodern mode. The volume looks at fiction by Edith Wharton, Henry James, Katherine Mansfield, and other authors, and at Iranian short fiction, the postcolonial short story, the fantastic in short fiction, and other subjects.

This collection explores the history and development of the anglophone short story since the beginning of the nineteenth century.

The ability to construct a nuanced narrative or complex character in the constrained form of the short story has sometimes been seen as the ultimate test of an author's creativity. Yet during the time when the short story was at its most popular - the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries - even the greatest writers followed strict generic conventions that were far from subtle. This expanded and updated translation of Florence Goyet's influential La Nouvelle, 1870-1925: Description d'un genre à son apogée (Paris, 1993) is the only study to focus exclusively on this classic period across different continents. Ranging through French, English, Italian, Russian and Japanese writing - particularly the stories of Guy de Maupassant, Henry James, Giovanni Verga, Anton Chekhov and Akutagawa Ry?nosuke - Goyet shows that these authors were able to create brilliant and successful short stories using the very simple 'tools of brevity' of that period. In this challenging and far-reaching study, Goyet looks at classic short stories in the context in which they were read at the time: cheap newspapers and higher-end periodicals. She demonstrates that, despite the apparent intention of these stories to question bourgeois ideals, they mostly affirmed the prejudices of their readers. In doing so, her book forces us to re-think our preconceptions about this 'forgotten' genre.

This book represents an attempt to tackle questions related to fragmented and often conflicting ideologies within Irish studies. Although a collective outcome, with contributions in English and Spanish, its unifying concern has been the appliance of postcolonial and gender perspectives to the analysis of Irish literature (prose, drama and verse) and cinema, as well as to the aesthetic production of both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Along the volume, while some authors have chosen to delve into the broad theoretical debate concerning the position of Irish studies within postcolonial and feminist theories, others offer detailed examinations of specific literary pieces and authors that fit in this panorama. All in all, the chapters are wide and diverse enough to trace a spatial and temporal map of the evolution of these paradigms within contemporary Irish studies, North and South of the border.

This Companion provides an accessible overview of short fiction by writers from England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and other international sites. A collection of international experts examine the development of the short story in a variety of contexts from the early nineteenth century to the present. They consider how dramatic changes in the publishing landscape during this period - such as the rise of the fiction magazine and the emergence of new opportunities in online and electronic publishing - influenced the form, covering subgenres from detective fiction to flash fiction. Drawing on a wealth of critical scholarship to place the short story in the English literary tradition, this volume will be an invaluable guide for students of the short story in English.

The Cambridge History of the English Short Story is the first comprehensive volume to capture the literary history of the English short story. Charting the origins and generic evolution of the English short story to the present day, and written by international experts in the field, this book covers numerous transnational and historical connections between writers, modes and forms of transmission. Suitable for English literature students and scholars of the English short story generally, it will become a standard work of reference in its field.

An aesthetic perspective on the short fiction of Chekhov, Joyce, Hemingway, O'Connor, and Carver Taking a distinctively aesthetic approach to the genre of realist short fiction, Kerry McSweeney clusters the work of five masters--Anton Chekhov, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Flannery O'Connor, and Raymond Carver--to offer a poetics of the form for students and scholars. At the center of this argument is the notion that the realist short story is a glimpse--powerful and tightly focused--into a world that the writer must precisely craft and in which the reader must fully invest. Selecting writers from different generational, national, and cultural backgrounds, McSweeney chooses writers based on their commitment to the realist representation of experience and their shared belief in the importance and efficacy of the short story form. By considering their efforts in tandem, he develops a means to assess the strategies and claims of realist short fiction. McSweeney demonstrates that when the comments these writers have made about their work are assembled and critically scrutinized, the result is an aesthetic critical model--as opposed to more interpretative models that focus attention on the determination (or indetermination) of meanings. He suggests that a fully adequate reading of a realist short story involves the integration of three components: the enjoyment and contemplation of the story in and of itself; affective receptivity, or a response to the story's emotional content; and cognitive activity, or the reflective consideration of the story's conceptual implications. In individual chapters on Chekov, Joyce, Hemingway, O'Connor, and Carver, this presentational model is applied to widely known and often anthologized readings from each writer. McSweeney brings into sharp focus the distinctive features of each piece, makes qualitative discriminations, and assesses the profitability of other critical models. He concludes with an invitation to test the mettle of his approach in reading other realist short story writers.

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.