A Glance at the History of the Short Story in English
R. C. Feddersen
- Stories organise and transmit sequences of human events and experiences into meaningful units. That is, story is a human frame for experience.
- James Cooper Lawrence in 1917 claimed the short story to be the oldest of all literary types and the basis for both ballad and epic.
- Narratives for many centuries have preserved, explained, entertained, and instructed.
· Early Narratives
- Parables: stories in the bible and Christ’s teachings with a general thesis or lesson.
- Fables: dating from 6th century B.C. endowing animals with human characteristics with a didactic function.
- Contes Devots: pious tales in French verse meant to relieve the lagging spirit.
- Exempla: short narratives used to illustrate sermons.
- Ballads: (12th C.) narrated dramatic accounts of love and death. According to Cooper Lawrence, ballads have originally been oral prose tales that (perhaps for memorising and reciting) became preserved in verse.
- Novellae: (14th C. Italy) a myriad of moral and secular stories past narrative genres notably by Boccaccio.
- Fabliau: celebrated the earthly side of life; these humorous, satiric, realistic, bawdy and exaggerated tales seemed to counterbalance the extreme piety of the didactic tales.
· Factors Affecting the Rise of Short Story in the 18th C.
1. Rise of realistic novel
2. Commonness of printing press
3. Rise and spread of periodicals publishing tales, essays, satires, etc.
4. Eighteen-century essays, especially in Addison and Steele’s Spectator, helped development of narrative style.
5. Emergence of Gothic literature in Germany and England.
6. Washington Irving’s transplanting of German folktales into American soil as early American short stories, giving mythic elements more realistic detail. (Though, Irving’s narratives remain ‘tales’ rather than short stories due to their lack of unity of structure and brevity of language.)
- Hawthorn, Poe and Gogol blended elements of folktale, romance, and the supernatural into a realistic fictional world. Here the narratives achieve a precise, tight construction.
- Poe’s Theory of Single Effect: that in the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design. Thus every element, every word, functions towards a particular effect.
- Poe asserted that “beneath the surface of the stories a strong undercurrent of suggestion runs continuously”.
· Poe vs. Hawthorn:
- They both incorporated mythic elements of older forms (romance and folktale), though Hawthorn’s stories do not resolve into simple allegories, but rather hover between the real world and the mythical, so that concrete details resonate in the half-light between symbolism and allegory.
- They both involved unusual protagonists in very unusual conflicts and situations.
- Both have followed Fraytag’s pattern of development strictly.
- Both hesitated between illusion and reality.
- Hawthorn is at times less plot-driven while Poe adhered to plot-irony and image-symbol stories.
- Herman Melville moved short story towards realistic depiction of events and characters away from mythical obsessions of Poe and Hawthorn.
- In the late 19th C. Realism became the dominant mode in American literature with Twain, Howells, Kate Chopin, Stephen Crane, Henry James and Edith Wharton who wrote stories of great detail and finely crafted plot from an objective point of view involving characters in mimetic fictional worlds where conflicts arise from interactions with the external realm and social forces.
- Why short story mostly emerged in America than in Britain is probably due to
1. the dominance of England’s Victorian novel.
2. the availability of American magazine market as a stimulus for American writers to produce short stories.
· Robert Louis Stevenson
- Best-known British short story writer in the 19th C.
- Found in American writers support for his belief that fiction should constantly return to its primitive origins in fable and fireside entertainment.
- Departed from Victorian notions of time.
- Asserted the primacy of the subject.
- Believed that setting must be revealed not so much in exposition as in action.
- Sought unity and brevity
- Influenced later British fictionists.
· Joseph Conrad, English short story writer,
- The bridge figure between 19th C. and 20th C.
- Combined a realistic sense of setting and narrative with symbolic substructure.
- Metaphoric prose
- Characters’ deeper conflicts are externalised in realistic situations.
- Anticipated thematic concerns of modernism: uncertain characters, alone in psychological realities, questioning the absolutism and idealism of the 19th C.
- Pre-modernist writers, Henry James, Kate Chopin, Sherwood Anderson and Hemingway admitted their being influenced by the nineteen-century, French short story writer Guy de Maupassant especially his deft craftsmanship and objective narrative style.
- Chekhov is often regarded as the harbinger of the modernist era in short story since his tonal qualities supersede any emphasis for action.
· Impressionistic short stories (latter half of the 19th C.):
- Plots are less definitive.
- Surface details are less distinct and far more suggestive.
- Symbolic imagery
- Tension between emotion and cognition
- Ambiguities and ironies
- Lyrical tone
· Modern stories:
- Avoided clarity and preciseness of plot.
- Broke with Fraytag’s structure.
- Favoured beginning the story in the middle or “medias res”.
- Favoured imagery over overt action.
- Emphasised suggestion and density.
- Rendered a fragmentary, subjective portrayal of reality.
- Their aesthetic coherence and unity provided them a source of wholeness.
- Employed subtle imagery to suggest the inner tensions of characters.
- Concept of time is often psychological rather than chronological. Through the stream-of-consciousness technique image patterns map a character’s psychic reality that is paradoxically disconnected from the external world.
- End abruptly in an impressive moment with a symbolic resonance or end with a character’s sudden realisation or intuitive insight (like Joyce’s epiphanies). Sometimes the characters are on the verge of an insight in which case the realisation takes place in the mind of the reader.
- Through indeterminate endings, stories invited the reader in the construction of meaning.
- Preferred everyday reality to the uncanny or the extraordinary.
- Modernist thematic obsessions: question of identity, the growing sense of alienation of the self from both modern society and the natural world.
- The emergence of New Criticism and Brooks and Penn Warren’s Understanding Fiction (1943) influenced fiction of the era by Formalist features of compression, irony, tension, etc.
- Katherine Mansfield, Joyce, Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson and Faulkner are major fictionists of the 29th C.
· Postmodern, Metafictional stories of the 1960s on:
- Distorted plots or seemingly nonexistent ones; anti-plot.
- Less determinate texts and symbols turning upon themselves for meaning.
- Mirror a distorted and infinite regress of reality.
- Foreground epistemological uncertainties.
- Find no guarantee to the authenticity of the real world.
- See the perceived world or reality itself as a fiction.
- Self-reflexive; narratives call attention to their own process of production.
- Self-parodying; anti-story.
- The voice of the narrator blends with the voice of the protagonist, of the narrative itself, of the author and of a myriad of cultural voices outside the text.
- Depict the fantastic and the magic embedded in the world of every-day reality.
- As a result of facing the ‘irreality’ of modern existence, they offer ‘alternative worlds’ of which Kafka is a pioneer.
- Self-deconstructive; influenced by Derridan concept of ‘decentring’ meaning.
- Include folk tradition, myth, media, and popular culture.
- Employed Collage and Montage.
- Blur the boundary between truth/illusion, fiction/reality, oasis/mirage…
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende, John Barth, Nabakov, Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, Tony Morrison, Julio Cortázar are the major fictionists of the postmodern era.
- Often minimalistic: bare, sterile narratives, highly selective of details, relying on simple, straightforward prose undecorated with figurative language: like Raymond Carver’s.