Short Story: Introduction, An

Description:
This new general introduction emphasises the importance of the short story to an understanding of modern fiction. In twenty succinct chapters, the study paints a complete portrait of the short story - its history, culture, aesthetics and economics. European innovators such as Chekhov, Flaubert and Kafka are compared to Irish, New Zealand and British practitioners such as Joyce, Mansfield and Carter as well as writers in the American tradition, from Hawthorne and Poe to Barthelme and Carver. Fresh attention is paid to experimental, postcolonial and popular fiction alongside developments in Anglo-American, Hispanic and European literature. Critical approaches to the short story are debated and reassessed, while discussion of the short story is related to contemporary critical theory. In what promises to be essential reading for students and academics, the study sets out to prove that the short story remains vital to the emerging culture of the twenty-first century. Key Features *A contemporary and theoretically informed survey *Comprehensive coverage of the short story from its folktale origins to the present day *Twenty clear topic-based chapters covering British, American and world fiction *Further reading in each chapter together with an extensive, up-to-date bibliography of primary and secondary works

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements; List of Illustrations; Preface; 1: Origins: From Folk-Tale to Art-Tale; 2: Riddles, Hoaxes and Conundrums; 3: Memory, Modernity and Orality; 4: Poe, O. Henry and the Well-Made Story; 5: Economies of Scale: The Short Story in England; 6: Brought to Book: The Anthology and Its Uses; 7: Between the Lines: Dissidence and the Short Story; 8: Enclosed Readings: The Short Story and the Academy; 9: Modernism and the Short Story; 10: The Short Story Cycle; 11: Character Parts: Identity in the Short Story; 12: Localities: Centres and Margins; 13: Tales of the City; 14: Romance and the Fragment; 15: Ghost Stories and Other Hauntings; 16: Popular Short Fictions; 17: The Experimental Text; 18: Postmodernism and the Short Story; 19: Minimalism/Dirty Realism/Hyperrealism; 20: Voyages Out: The Postcolonial Short Story; Bibliography; Index.

Author Biography:
Paul March-Russell is Honorary Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the University of Kent, Canterbury. He is also Commissioning Editor of the Critical Studies in Science Fiction series with Gylphi. His other publications include Ruskin in Perspective, co-edited with Carmen Casaliggi (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), and an edited volume of May Sinclair's Uncanny Stories (Wordsworth Editions, 2006). He is currently editing George Egerton's The Wheel of God (Pickering and Chatto, forthcoming) and writing a study of the Neo-Romantic movement, 1925-55.