THE SHORT STORY: AN OVERVIEW OF THE HISTORY

AND EVOLUTION OF THE GENRE

VIORICA PATEA

A story is a way to say something that

can’t be said any other way, and it takes
every word in the story to say what the
meaning is. You tell a story because a
statement would be inadequate. When
anybody asks what a story is about, the
only proper thing is to tell him to read the
story. The meaning of fiction is not
abstract meaning but experienced
meaning, and the purpose of making
statements about the meaning of the story
is only to help you to experience that
meaning more fully.1

Theory and history of the form

As early as 1937 Elizabeth Bowen claimed, “The short story is a
young art … the child of this century”, which developed at the same
time as the cinema and photography.2 According to Mary Rohrberger,
one of the first theorizers of the genre, “short narrative fiction is as old

This study is part of two research projects funded by grants from the Regional
Ministry of Culture of the Autonomous Government of Castile and Leon (ref. number
SA012A10-1) and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (ref. number
FFI2010-15063).
1
Flannery O’Connor, “Writing Short Stories”, in Mystery and Manners, eds Sally and
Robert Fitzgerald, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969, 96.
2
Elizabeth Bowen, “The Faber Book of Modern Short Stories” (1937), in The New
Short Story Theories, ed. Charles E. May, Athens: Ohio University Press, 1994, 152.
See also Julio Cortázar, “Some Aspects of the Short Story”, in ibid., 246-47.
2 Viorica Patea

as the history of literature …. But the short story, as we know it today,

is the newest of literary genres.”3
The origins of the short form go back to myth and biblical verse
narratives, medieval sermons and romance, fables, folktales, ballads
and the rise of the German Gothic in the eighteenth century. But its
mythic origins, filtered through the Romantic influence, had to come
to terms with the conventions of mimesis and vraisemblance of
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century realism.4 Charles May observes
that “the short story has from its beginning been a hybrid form
combining both the metaphoric mode of the old romance and the
metonymic mode of the new realism”.5
Although the short story constitutes a form in its own right, it has
suffered a theoretical neglect in comparison with other genres such as
poetry, drama, the epic, or the novel. As May argues, “a genre only
truly comes into being when the conventions that constitute it are
articulated within the larger conceptual context of literature as a
whole”.6 In the case of the short story this was a long-deferred
process. Until half a century ago those who theorized about the genre
were not literary critics but practitioners of the form themselves:
Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville and Anton Chekhov in the
nineteenth century; and Henry James, Flannery O’Connor, Julio
Cortázar and Eudora Welty, among others, in the twentieth. But
interest in the short story has been growing continuously since the

3
Mary Rohrberger, “The Short Story: A Proposed Definition”, in Short Story
Theories, ed. Charles May, Athens OH: Ohio University Press, 1976, 80.
4
Charles May believes the short story is “the structural core of all fiction in its
derivation from folktale and myth” (“The Metaphoric Motivation in Short Fiction: ‘In
the Beginning Was the Story’”, in Short Story Theory at a Crossroads, eds Susan
Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989,
64). He persuasively observes that the main challenge the short form poses to its
practitioners is how to integrate the tension of the mythic with the realistic modality, a
reconciliation that is finally projected in the aesthetic (“Why Short Stories Are
Essential and Why They Are Seldom Read”, in The Art of Brevity: Excursions in
Short Fiction Theory and Analysis, eds Per Winther et al., Columbia: University of
South Carolina Press, 2004, 22). On this issue, see also Charles May, The Short Story:
The Reality of Artifice (1995) rpt. New York: Routledge, 2002, 1-42; May, “The
Nature of Knowledge in Short Fiction”, in May, The New Short Story Theories, 138-
43; Warren Walker, “From Raconteur to Writer: Oral Roots and Printed Leaves of
Short Fiction”, in The Teller and the Tale: Aspects of the Short Story, ed. Wendell M.
Aycock, Lubbock: Texas Tech Press, 1982, 13-26.
5
May, The Short Story: The Reality of Artifice, 72.
6
Ibid., 108.
 The Short Story: An Overview 3

Sixties; critical and theoretical studies of the form have been

flourishing since the last decades of the twentieth century.
Poe’s critical comments towards the middle of the nineteenth
century are responsible for the birth of the short story as a unique
genre.7 As the first short story theorist, he brought into discussion
issues of form, style, length, design, authorial goals, and reader affect,
developing the framework within which the short story is discussed
even today. Evaluating the status of the short story as a genre, he
ranked it very high in the pantheon of arts, second only to the lyric
form. His major contribution was to invest the short story with tension
and thus to impregnate it with the defining attributes of poetry. Its
compact and unified form, which it shares with the lyric, allows the
short story to achieve effects unattainable in the novel. He also
observed that its brevity and intensity created a strong “undercurrent
of suggestion”.8 Poe was the first to consider endings as crucial
elements in compositional strategies and defined the short story in
terms of reading experience.
A traditional view of the short story is that it is a compressed,
unified, and plotted form. Theoretical discussions of the genre explore
notions such as totality, brevity, intensity, suggestiveness, unity of
effect, closure, and design. Attention to the formal structure of the
short story is mainly a twentieth-century critical enterprise. The
aesthetics of the genre’s form attracted the interest of critics and
narrative theorists in the Sixties – the period of the international
dissemination of Russian Formalist writings of the 1920s (Boris
Éjxenbaum, Viktor Shklovsky), the emergence of structuralism
(Vladimir Propp) and anthropology (Claude Lévi-Strauss), and the
philosophy of culture (Ernest Cassirer). The rise of the short theory
then also further developed in parallel with the growth of interest in
narratology, reader-response criticism, and discourse analysis and
cognitive science.

7
See Poe’s review of Zinzendorff, and Other Stories by L.H. Sigourney, Southern
Literary Messenger, January 1836; his review of Night and Morning: A Novel by
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Graham’s Magazine, April 1841; his review of Twice Told-
Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Graham’s Magazine, May 1842, are all to be found in
Edgar Allan Poe, Essays and Reviews, ed. G.R. Thompson, New York: Library of
America, 1984, 874-91, 146-60, 568-69. Poe’s articles and passages of his aesthetic
pronouncements on the short story excerpted from his lesser-known reviews are
conveniently collected in May, The New Short Story Theories, 59-72.
8
Poe, review of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales, 571.
4 Viorica Patea

Pioneering work on the theoretical analysis of short stories goes

back to Frank O’Connor’s A Lonely Voice (1963) and Mary
Rohrberger’s Hawthorne and the Modern Short Story: A Study of
Genre (1966), both of which owed debts to Brander Matthews’ early
The Philosophy of the Short-Story (1901).9
The establishment of a field of short story theory, though, is
largely due to Charles May’s groundbreaking study Short Story
Theories (1976), a collection of essays that summed up various
perspectives on the short story and opened up new avenues for future
research within the genre. His New Short Story Theories (1994) soon
became a sourcebook for studies of the form and a compendium of
frameworks within which the short story is currently being analyzed.
May’s The Reality of Artifice (1995) was a further step toward
providing a firm critical history to the form, tracing the origins, shape,
influences, and evolution of the short story from its beginnings to the
present day.
Efforts to recognize the short story as a valid subject for discussion
were furthered by Susan Lohafer’s theoretically challenging collection
Coming to Terms with the Short Story (1983) and her co-edited
volumes, Short Story Theories at a Crossroads (1989) and The Tales
We Tell: Perspectives on the Short Story (1998),10 which make an
effort to ground the short story in cognitive patterns. More than any
other set of components, Lohafer relates storyness to closural
elements and analyzes the reader’s perception of storyness and
preclosure (those instances in which the reader senses that the story
might end although it does not). Within the same line, John Gerlach’s
Toward the End: Closure and Structure in the American Short Story
(1985)11 builds a comprehensive system of narrative closural
categories for the short story, based on the assumption that endings
condition our reading of the entire text as well as the endings
themselves.

9
Frank O’Connor, The Lonely Voice, Cleveland, OH: World, 1963; Mary Rohrberger,
Hawthorne and the Modern Short Story: A Study in Genre, The Hague: Mouton,
1966; Brander Matthews, The Philosophy of the Short-Story, New York: Longmans,
Green, 1901.
10
Susan Lohafer, Coming to Terms with the Short Story, Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 1983; The Tales We Tell: Perspectives on the Short Story, eds
Barbara Lounsberry, Susan Lohafer et al., Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998.
11
John Gerlach, Toward the End: Closure and Structure in the American Short Story,
Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1985.
 The Short Story: An Overview 5

Studies of autonomous short stories that highlighted various

interconnections between works within the same volume introduced a
new genre for theoretical analysis, successively called the “short story
cycle” (Forrest Ingram, 1971), the “short story sequence” (Luscher,
1989) and the “short story composite” (Lundén, 1999).12 As Rolf
Lundén argues, short story composites go back to Boccaccio’s
Decameron, or Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, and draw on
independent yet interrelated stories and episodes that articulated the
oldest sagas and epics. Their modern counterparts can be found in the
short story composites developed by James Joyce in Dubliners (1914),
Sherwood Anderson in Winesburg, Ohio (1919), Ernest Hemingway
in In Our Time (1925), William Faulkner in Go Down Moses (1942),
or Eudora Welty in Golden Apples (1949), to mention only a few. The
generic specificity of the composite expresses the underlying tension
between “variety and unity, separateness and interconnectedness,
fragmentation and continuity, openness and closure”.13 Studies of the
short story composite focus on the existing variety of textual
strategies, networks of association, and underlying patterns, themes,
characters and motives that bridge the apparent gaps between the
individual stories. These strategies suggest the form’s close alliance
with sonnet sequences, music, and lyric poetry, which similarly
feature recurrent patterns and the progressive development of themes
and motifs.14
Beginning in the Eighties, a series of studies examined the short
fiction belonging to different schools and artistic time periods – such
as modernism or postmodernism. Clare Hanson’s Short Stories and
Short Fictions, 1880-1980 (1985), as well as her collection Re-
reading the Short Story (1989) and Dominic Head’s The Modernist
Short Story (1992), analyze the many ways in which modernism
changed the shape of modern fiction, supplanting plot with mood,

12
Forrest Ingram, Representative Short Story Cycles of the Twentieth Century:
Studies in a Literary Genre, The Hague: Mouton, 1971; Robert Luscher, “The Short
Story Sequence: An Open Book”, in Short Story Theory at a Crossroads, 148-67;
Rolf Lundén, The United Stories of America: Studies in the Short Story Composite,
Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999.
13
Lundén, The United Stories of America, 12.
14
See Adrian Hunter, The Cambridge Introduction to the Short Story in English,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
6 Viorica Patea

impressions and moments of awareness.15 Similarly, Farhat

Iftekharrudin’s co-edited collection The Postmodern Short Story:
Forms and Issues (2003) pursued the subsequent evolution of the
genre in its postmodern instantiations, which tend to explore the
illusions of the real and make artistic devices and conventions the
subject of their fiction.16 W.H. New’s Dreams of Speech and
Violence: The Art of the Short Story in Canada and New Zealand
(1987), followed by Gerald Lynch’s The One and the Many: English-
Canadian Short Story Cycles (2001), were among the first to explore
genre developments from a postcolonial perspective.17
In the Eighties the publishing house Twayne inaugurated two
series, one on studies of short fiction and one on the critical history of
the short story; special issues on the form were published by Modern
Fiction Studies (1982), and the Dutch journal Poetics (1988); the
Journal of the Short Story in English was founded in 1983, the First
International Conference, which was to become a biannual event, was
initiated in 1989; and by 1994, the date that marks the foundation of
the journal Short Story, the genre already constituted an autonomous
field of study.18

The architecture of the short story: aspects of structure and form

Theories about the short story as a genre tend to be “interdisciplinary
and gender-bending”.19 Discussions of the short story relate the form
to myth, folklore, romance, genre theory, cognitive science,
narratology, discourse analysis, and visual arts. From its very

15
Clare Hanson, Short Stories and Short Fictions, 1880-1980, London: Macmillan,
1985; Re-reading the Short Story, ed. Clare Hanson, New York: St Martin’s, 1989;
Dominic Head, The Modernist Short Story, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1992.
16
The Postmodern Short Story, eds Farhat Iftekharrudin et al., Westport, CT: Praeger,
2003. Among recent interdisciplinary contributions to the field, see Contemporary
Debates on the Short Story, eds José R. Ibáñez, José Francisco Fernández and Carmen
M. Bretones, Bern: Peter Lang 2007.
17
W.H. New’s Dreams of Speech and Violence: The Art of the Short Story in Canada
and New Zealand, Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1987; Gerald Lynch’s The One
and the Many: English-Canadian Short Story Cycles (1987), rpt. Toronto: Toronto
University Press, 2001; Telling Stories: Postcolonial Short Fiction in English, ed.
Jacqueline Bardolph, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001.
18
For the most recent studies, see Paul Russell, The Short Story: An Introduction,
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009.
19
Susan Lohafer, Introduction to The Tales We Tell, xi.
 The Short Story: An Overview 7

beginnings the short story was considered a form that mediated

between the lyric and the novel, yet within its space it came to exhibit
a protean variety.20 As Penn affirms, the short story “has genres of its
own invention”.21 Besides the novel and the lyric form, the short story
is close cousins with the essay (Hesse), the letter (Pasco), cinema
(Bowen, Bates), and photography (Cortázar), as well as painting and
the visual arts (Hanson).22
Its long-standing theoretical neglect, though, made the short story
appear to be “a form at the margins”.23 Seen as ex-centric and at the
low end of the hierarchy of arts – contrary to Poe’s earlier vision – the
short story began to be invested with the vindicating powers of the
wronged and the underrated. The first to attribute subversive powers
to the genre was the Irish writer Frank O’Connor, who defined the
short story as the “lonely voice” of “outlawed figures wandering about
the fringes of society”. In his view, the short story is a genre that
“never had a hero”, and its protagonists have been collective groups of
submerged populations.24 In the same line, Marie Louise Pratt links
the short story with regional, gender, and political marginalization. In
her opinion, the form flourishes in regions in which new groups seek
to affirm their voice within emerging national literatures or in the
process of decolonization.25 Clare Hanson endowed the form with the
capacity of expressing the repressed knowledge of a dominant
culture.26 These critics argue that the short story thrives in societies
with no fixed cultural framework, especially in colonial contexts, and

20
Hanson, Short Stories and Short Fictions, 9.
21
W.S. Penn, “The Tale as Genre in Short Fiction”, in May, The New Short Story
Theories, 44.
22
See Douglas Hesse, “A Boundary Zone: First-Person Short Stories and Narrative
Essays”, in Lohafer and Clarey, Short Story Theory at a Crossroads, 85-105; Allan H.
Pasco, “On Defining Short Stories”, in May, The New Short Story Theories, 114-30;
Bowen, “The Faber Book of Modern Short Stories”, 256. For H.E. Bates the short
story and film resort to the same technique that consists of gestures, shift shots,
moments of suggestion: “The Modern Short Story: A Retrospect”, in May, The New
Short Story Theories, 76. Cortázar, “Some Aspects of the Short Story”, 246. Clare
Hanson, Introduction to Re-reading the Short Story, 6.
23
Hanson, Introduction to Re-reading the Short Story, 3.
24
Frank O’Connor, “The Lonely Voice”, in May, The New Short Story Theories, 87
and 86, respectively.
25
Marie Louise Pratt, “The Short Story: The Short and the Long of It”, in May, The
New Short Story Theories, 104. See also O’Connor, “The Lonely Voice”, 83-93.
26
Hanson, Re-reading the Short Story, 1-8.
8 Viorica Patea

is linked to marginal people, women, or outsiders, all of whom are

plagued by a sense of exile and existential isolation.27 For them the
volatility of class structure accounts for the genre’s experimental
nature.
Because the short story is situated at varying crossroads, defining
the short story genre has proved problematic.28 Attempts at definition
have been highly diverse: short stories have been approached in terms
of unity (Poe, Brander Matthews), brevity, intensity and tension
(Oates, Bader, Friedman, Cortázar),29 lyricism (Lukács, Moravia),30
theme (O’Connor’s “human loneliness”),31 insight, vision and mystery
(Éjxenbaum, May, Rohrberger), hybridity (May, Pratt),32 fractals
(Leslie Marmon Silko),33 and closure (Lohafer, Gerlach).
Nevertheless, it is still difficult to determine which features
distinguish it from other genres and account for its unique nature. A
range of different issues and perspectives also informs the discourse
on genre: the short story’s origin in myth and oral storytelling (May);
its focus on the ineffable (Rohrberger); issues of length in the form of
contemporary attraction to minimalism (Zavala);34 concern with
fragments, closure or frames (Reid,35 Winther); or the generic
affinities the short story shares with the novel, the lyric,
autobiography, letter-writing, music, and so on. As Charles May aptly
observes, among the most challenging generic issues remain the
relationship between sequence and significance, mystery and pattern,

27
See Pasco, “On Defining Short Stories”, 119; Pratt, “The Short Story”, 104.
28
Gerald Gillespie, “Novella, Nouvelle, Novela, Short Novel: A Review of Terms”,
Neophilologus, LI/1 (January 1967), 117-27; Charles May, “Prolegomenon to a
Generic Study of the Short Story”, Studies in Short Fiction, XXXIII/4 (Fall 1996),
461-73. For definitions based on generic expectations, see André Jolles, Formes
Simples (1930), rpt. Paris: Seuil, 1972.
29
See Joyce Carol Oates, “The Beginnings: Origins and Art of the Short Story”, in
The Tales We Tell, 46-52; A.L. Bader, “The Structure of the Modern Short Story”,
and Norman Friedman, “What Makes the Short Story Short?”, in May, The New Short
Story Theories, 107-15 and 131-46.
30
Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971, 51-52;
Alberto Moravia, “The Short Story and the Novel”, in May, The New Short Story
Theories, 147-51.
31
O’Connor, “The Lonely Voice”, 87.
32
May, The Reality of Artifice, 72.
33
Leslie Marmon Silko, “Earth, Air, Water, Mind”, in The Tales We Tell, 92.
34
Lauro Zavala, “De la Teoría Literaria a la Minificción Posmoderna”, Ciências
Sociais Unisinos, XLIII/1 (January-April 2007), 86-96.
35
Ian Reid, “Generic Variations on a Colonial Topos”, in The Tales We Tell, 83-90.
 The Short Story: An Overview 9

the fusion of the trivial and the significant, and the eschewal of
explications.36
In the 1980s, some critics doubted that a definition of the short
story was possible. But while Mary Louise Pratt considered this an
hopeless enterprise,37 Charles May hoped to provide a possible
definition of the discipline through Wittgensteinian family
resemblance theories, which assume existing clusters of qualities,
family traits and dominant characteristics.38 According to the Russian
Formalist Boris Éjxenbaum, the short story is a primary elemental
form which maintains its strong ties to myth and whose characteristics
are compression and concentration: “The story is a riddle.” In his
view, the novel and short story are “not only different in kind but also
inherently at odds”. While the short story “is a fundamental,
elementary form”, the novel remains “synchretic”. The discrepancy
between the two is marked by the essential disparity between short
and long forms: “the story is a problem in posing a single equation
with one unknown; the novel a problem involving various rules and
soluble with a whole system of equations with various unknowns in
which the intermediary steps are more important than the final
answer.”39
Generic considerations of the short story focus on its split
allegiances to the narrative and the lyric.40 The short story shares with
the novel the medium of prose, yet it also makes use of poetry’s
metaphorical language, its strategies of indirection and suggestion. So
although the novel and the short story resort to the same prose
medium, their artistic methods are different.41 The short form
possesses both the peculiarities of storyness and narrativity and the
intensity, tension, compression and suggestion of the lyric mode. The
short story blends the brevity and intensity of the lyric with narrative

36
May, “Why Short Stories Are Essential”, 14-25.
37
Pratt, “The Short Story”, 91-113; May, “The Nature of Knowledge in Short
Fiction”, 138-43.
38
May, “Prolegomenon to a Generic Study of the Short Story”, 461-73.
39
Boris M. Éjxenbaum, “O. Henry and the Theory of the Short Story”, in May, The
New Short Story Theories, 81-82.
40
See Gerlach, Toward the End, 7; Oates, “The Beginnings”, 46-52; Helmut
Bonheim, “The 200 Genres of the Short Story”, Miscelánea: A Journal of English
and American Studies, XXIV (2001), 39-52.
41
Valerie Shaw, The Short Story: A Critical Introduction (1983), rpt. London:
Longman, 1995, 3.
10 Viorica Patea

features such as plot, denouement, character, and events. It shares to a

certain degree the characteristics of poetic language and metaphor,
since it operates through oblique telling, ellipsis and implication,
shunning the more explicit statements and causal effects that
characterize longer works of prose. The short story emphasizes tone
and imagery. Its maximum economy targets intensity, suggestiveness
and lyricism.
The fusion of these antagonistic traits accounts for the singular
effects of the short story, which Poe defined as a unique narrative
form. In The Theory of the Novel, Georg Lukács argues that the lyric
nature of the short story results from a process of selection, a “form-
giving, structuring, delimitating act” that emphasizes the “strangeness
and ambiguity of life”.42 The lyric element is inherent in the short
story’s compact form. And it is through selection that the trivial detail
becomes charged with meaning. More stylized than the novel, the
short story tends to distort everyday reality more than long-form
narratives do and operates through intuition and lyric effects. In fact,
lyricism is an inherent feature that derives from the tension and
intensity of the short form and is present even in the most realistic
short stories. Unlike the novel, which basically has a more “public”
vocation, the short story remains “romantic, individualistic and
intransigent”, the affair of a lonely voice.43
Poe argued that, like the lyric poem, the short story should be read
at one sitting. Because of its compressed structure, the short form
lends itself to pictorial perceptions and can be perceived in spatial
terms by the reader.44 The form’s brevity invites an analogy between
the short story and the spatial dimension of visual arts – such as
painting and photography – which differentiates the short form from
the temporality of the novel, which more clearly unfolds in time.
While the novel operates on the assumption that it presents “a full and
authentic report of human experience”,45 the short story deals only
with a fragment, an incident, a single small-scale event. In contrast to
the novel, which focuses on the interconnectedness of things and on
events that take place over a longer period of time, the short story

42
Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, 51-52.
43
O’Connor, “The Lonely Voice”, 88.
44
See Hanson, Short Stories and Short Fictions, 67-68; May, The Reality of Artifice,
89; Pasco, “On Defining Short Stories”, 119.
45
Rohrberger, Hawthorne and the Modern Short Story, 125.
 The Short Story: An Overview 11

depicts only a fragment. It centers on a scene, a person cut off from a

larger social, historical or existential continuum,46 and concentrates on
a moment of awareness rather than a completed action. Unlike the
novel, the short story does not attempt to embrace the whole of
experience with its complex fabric of causal processes or elaborate
temporal durations; instead it presents “slices” or “snapshots” of
reality. Raymond Carver argues that the short story offers only a
glimpse that, “given life, turn[s] into something that illuminates the
moment” and so acquires “further-ranging consequences and
meaning”. The short story writer’s task consists precisely in
“invest[ing] the glimpse with all that is in his power”.47 Moreover, this
moment plucked out of the flow of time seeks meaning beyond the
contingent and the particular. This “glimpse” or “flash”, to use Nadine
Gordimer’s terms, strives towards something more general and
universal, something that is left unstated and appears to be
incommunicable.48
Julio Cortázar discusses the difference between the novel and the
short story through the metaphoric comparison of photography and
motion pictures. Whereas the novel, like a film, constitutes “an open
order”, the short story resembles the photograph, which isolates a
fragment from the whole, circumscribes it, and paradoxically uses its
limitations in order to open it up to a much more ample reality,
presenting “a dynamic vision that spiritually transcends the space
reached by the camera”.49
Charles May convincingly observes that the problem of the short
story writer is how to transform a story, which is a series of events,
into something significant, something that transcends mere
sequence.50 The solution to this dilemma lies in the two defining
attributes of the short story: intensity and tension. Both result from the
compactness of the form, its cultivation of economy and the adoption
of an oblique, elliptical and concise style. Carver contends that for a
story to exist “there has to be tension, a sense that something is

46
Pratt, “The Short Story”, 99-101. See also Pasco, “On Defining Short Stories”, 124-
26; Wendell Harris, “Vision and Form: The English Novel and the Emergence of the
Short Story”, in May, The New Short Story Theories, 182-94.
47
Raymond Carver, “On Writing”, in ibid., 277.
48
See also Sudden Fiction: American Short Stories, eds Robert Shapard and James
Thomas, Salt Lake City, UT: Gibbs Smith, 1986.
49
Cortázar, “Some Aspects of the Short Story”, 246.
50
May, “Why Short Stories Are Essential”, 14.
12 Viorica Patea

imminent, that certain things are in relentless motion”. He draws

attention to the fact that this tension in fiction is created not only by
“the way concrete words are linked together to make up the visible
action of the story”, but also by “the things that are left out, that are
implied, the landscape just under the smooth (but sometimes broken
and unsettled) surface of things”.51
The aesthetics of brevity imposes limitations that directly affect the
short story’s epistemology and style. Brevity prevents the short story
from being cumulative and does not allow for extended explanations.
The aesthetics of economy accounts for the genre’s cryptic and
elliptical nature. Given the confinement and limitations of the short
form, the writer cannot indulge in details. Compactness and
conciseness are responsible for the short story’s proclivity to
fragmentariness, its tendency to describe moments instead of
processes, its preference for the outline of events instead of events in
their detailed wholeness. The very shortness of the form requires a
style that goes against literary conventions based on mimetic artistic
principles, that eludes the trivial or the merely decorative, and that
avoids causal relationships or sequences of events.
Short fiction makes room for commonplace things and events, yet
the ordinary or the uneventful are never allowed to remain so.
Raymond Carver observes that the prosaic elements –“[a] chair, [a]
window curtain, [a] fork, [a] stone, a woman’s earring”– that appear
in the short story have to be endowed “with immense, even startling
power”.52 In a short story, as in a poem, particulars cannot remain
such; they need to be invested with implication, suggestiveness.
Details need be “concrete and convey meaning”, and “the particular
must be given general significance”.53 The effect of brevity is
relevance, intensity, and tension. Since the short story writer cannot
resort to elaborate statements, the challenge consists, as Flannery
O’Connor points out, in making “the concrete work double time”.54
Brevity deforms the real and imposes a greater need for stylization,
which in turn requires a greater need for design.55 In The

51
Carver, “On Writing”, 277.
52
Ibid., 275.
53
Ibid., 277; Bowen, “The Faber Book of Modern Short Stories”, 259. See also May,
“Why Short Stories Are Essential”, 17-18.
54
O’Connor, “Writing Short Stories”, 98.
55
Hanson, Short Stories and Short Fictions, 6.
 The Short Story: An Overview 13

Dehumanization of Art, the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset

argues that artistic technique involves a distortion and
defamiliarization of everyday reality.56 With its elliptical, metaphoric
and metonymic discourse, the short story’s brevity generates a
heightened sense of concentration, compression and intensity that
counters mimetic conceptions of art, leading to an increased emphasis
on aesthetic stylization. Strategies of brevity and concentration, then,
are responsible for the highly formalized style of the short story. Since
tension and intensity are its constitutive traits, the short story,
including work written in its most realistic vein, does not imitate
external reality but presents a highly patterned and stylized
representation of experience. As May observes, “Even the most
realistic style emphasizes the difference between everyday reality and
the reality of fiction itself, which is the only way to penetrate into the
real”.57
Chekhov’s dictum – “In the short stories it is better to say not
enough than to say too much” 58 – anticipates by several decades the
modernist aesthetic agenda and Hemingway’s famous iceberg theory,
inspired, in turn, by Pound’s imagist principles. A century later the
postmodernist John Barth observed that, unlike the novel, which tends
towards inclusion, the short story inclines towards exclusion: “Short
story writers as a class, from Poe to Paley, incline to see how much
they can leave out, and novelists as a class, from Petronius to
Pynchon, how much they can leave in.”59 The elimination of
intermediary links, situations, and ideas as well as the tightly wrought
unity of the form invite the reader to go on a quest for something that
is hinted at, obscured or hidden behind the texture of words.

56
José Ortega y Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art and Other Writings on Art and
Culture, New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956, 23. See also May, “Chekhov
and the Modern Short Story”, in May, The New Short Story Theories, 214-16.
57
May, “Chekhov and the Modern Short Story”, 211.
58
Anton Chekhov, “The Short Story”, in May, The New Short Story Theories, 198.
Ernest Hemingway formulated his omission theory thus: “If a writer of a prose knows
enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the
reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as
strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of the iceberg
is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. The writer who omits things
because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing” (Ernest
Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, New York: Scribner, 1932, 192; also in Ernest
Hemingway on Writing, ed. Larry Phillips, New York: Scribner, 1984, 77).
59
John Barth, “A Novel Perspective: ‘It’s a Short Story’”, in The Tales We Tell, 2.
14 Viorica Patea

The short form yearns towards a quintessential reality that lies

beyond the particulars of everyday life or the appearance of the
extensional world.60 Relying on intensity and tension, the short story
also aspires to transpose the incommunicable into aesthetic forms. As
Cortázar aptly remarks, whether the short story depicts a real or
imaginary happening, it always possesses “that mysterious property of
illuminating something beyond itself, to the extent that a common
domestic occurrence … is converted into an implacable summary of a
certain human condition or the burning symbol of a social or historical
order”.61
Critics and short story writers agree that the short story is
concerned with an exceptional, mysterious, strange, unexpected or
unusual experience. Walter Benjamin argues that the short story
dwells on the mysteries of human experience that go against our
logico-rational frame of mind, contradicting the laws of plausibility
and verisimilitude.62 Writers such as Eudora Welty, Flannery
O’Connor, and Julio Cortázar emphasize the mystery that lies at the
heart of the short story. The dynamics of the form rest on the clash
between common everyday experiences and a hidden, unconscious,
strange reality that deeply unsettles our logico-rational certainties and
the conventions of the ordinary. The philosophy of the short story
seems to imply, as Rohrberger suggests, “the metaphysical
assumption that the idea and the real merge at the moment of
revelation, a moment as profound as epiphany”. 63
Critics have noted that the short story has the potential to challenge
notions of conventional truth and to dwell on moments of breakup in
the experience of everyday reality.64 The short story conflates time
and upsets Cartesian categories and our empirical certainties.

60
May, “The Nature of Knowledge in Short Fiction”, 138-43; May, The Reality of
Artifice, 1-2.
61
Cortázar, “Some Aspects of the Short Story”, 247.
62
Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller”, in Illuminations, New York: Schocken Books,
1968, 83-109.
63
Mary Rohrberger, “Where Do We Go from Here?”, in The Tales We Tell, 205. See
also Valerie Shaw, The Short Story: A Critical Introduction (1983), rpt. London:
Longman, 1995, 193; May, “Why Short Stories Are Essential”, 16-18.
64
In “The Nature of Knowledge in Short Fiction”, May rightly observes that “the
short story is closer to the nature of reality as we experience it in moments when we
are made aware of the inauthenticity of everyday life, those moments when we sense
the inadequacy of our categories of conceptual reality” (May, The New Short Story
Theories, 141). See also May, The Reality of Artifice, 52.
 The Short Story: An Overview 15

Paraphrasing T.S. Eliot, Maurice Shadbolt contends that the short

story attempts to produce a “hallucinatory point in which time past
and time future seem to coexist in time present”.65 To Cortázar the
short story offers “a live synthesis … something like the shimmering
water in a glass, the fleeting within the permanent”.66
For Flannery O’Connor, the challenge for the short story writer
consists in “how to make the action he describes reveal as much of the
mystery of existence as possible”.67 Along the same lines, Welty
confirms that “we can’t really see the solid outlines” of a short story,
that “it seems bathed in something of its own … wrapped in an
atmosphere”.68 Mystery is the effect of brevity and the form’s reliance
on pattern and structure.69 The mystery of the short story proceeds,
then, not only from its mythical or romantic affinities but also from
the compactness, intensity and economy of its short form. The
mysterious is provoked by the readers’ intuitions of an unresolved and
unstated reality, which become amplified in the absence of
explanatory elements.
The short story probes the nature of the real, which proves to be
more complex than the reality of mere appearances. Melville
associated Hawthorne’s tales with the art of telling the truth.70 To him
the actual world was a mere façade, an illusion. The fictive world led
to truth, although, paradoxically, the way to it led from the surface of
reality to the core of meaning.
Theorists agree that the epistemology of the short story is one of
revelation, vision or insight. The fundamental element of the short
form resides not in narrative structure but in “the moment of truth” or
of crisis conducive to a heightened awareness, a momentary
realization that marks the passage from ignorance to knowledge.71 As

65
Maurice Shadbolt, “The Hallucinatory Point”, in May, The New Short Story
Theories, 269.
66
Cortázar, “Some Aspects of the Short Story”, 246.
67
O’Connor, “Writing Short Stories”, 90.
68
Eudora Welty, “The Reading and Writing of Short Stories”, in May, The New Short
Story Theories, 163.
69
May, “Why Short Stories Are Essential”, 16.
70
Herman Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses” (1850), in Melville: Pierre, Israel
Potter, The Piazza Tales, The Confidence Man, Uncollected Prose, Billy Budd, ed.
Harrison Hayford, New York: Library of America, 1962, 1154-71.
71
Pratt, “The Short Story”, 99; Robert F. Marler, “From Tale to Short Story: The
Emergence of a New Genre in the 1850s”, in May, The New Short Story Theories,
172.
16 Viorica Patea

Cortázar remarks, “A story is meaningful when it ruptures its own

limits with that explosion of spiritual energy, which suddenly
illuminates something far beyond that small and sometimes sordid
anecdote which is being told”.72 This formulation seems to be a
recasting of Pound’s famous postulations on the effects of imagist
poetics, his conception of the poem as a “delightful psychic
experience” in which the poem tries to record “the precise instant
when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a
thing inward and subjective”.73 The short story also shares this
mysterious property of bringing a fragment to the point of
translucency. It renders a moment “whose intensity makes it seem
outside the ordinary stream of time” and “whose significance lies
outside the ordinary range of experience”.74 The dramatization of this
moment of awareness can equally belong to the marvelous, the
psychological, or the hidden aspects of everyday life.
Flannery O’Connor remarks that short story writers make “alive
some experience which we are not accustomed to observe everyday,
or which ordinary man may never experience in his ordinary life”.75
The short story deals with dreams or fears or psychological
obsessions, the marvelous, the fantastic, the absurd.76
Whether fantastic or realistic, modernist or postmodernist,
focusing on imaginary happenings or realistic everyday accounts, the
short story strives towards something unstated yet hinted at in the text,
which accounts for its intensity. One could say it has a liminal quality,
constantly attempting to dissolve the boundary between the known
and the unknown, the visible and the invisible, the surface and the
inner secret of things.

The evolution of the short form

Although old in literary lineage, the short story took shape as a
modern form only in the nineteenth century. Thanks to Poe, who
articulated its conventions into a larger conceptual framework, it
became America’s most identifiable homegrown literary genre and

72
Cortázar, “Some Aspects of the Short Story”, 247.
73
Ezra Pound, A Memoir of Gaudier Brzeska, New York: New Directions, 1970, 89.
74
Harris, “Vision and Form”, 188.
75
Flannery O’Connor, “The Grotesque in Southern Fiction”, in Mystery and
Manners, 40.
76
May, “Why Short Stories Are Essential”, 17.
 The Short Story: An Overview 17

contribution to world literature.77 In the nineteenth century the

allegoric and symbolic language of Irving, Poe and Hawthorne shaped
the short story as a Romantic form, while Melville initiated the
transition to realism.78 These two legacies, the mythico-Romantic
tradition and the modern realistic one, then coexisted in a tense
balance throughout the twentieth century in the works of Anderson,
Hemingway, Joyce, Faulkner, and Welty and in the short fictions of
postmodern writers.79
If the nineteenth-century short story was mainly dramatic and
relied heavily on plot, the modernist short story came to renounce
narrative structure. Even more than work in the mode of the fantastic,
such modernist forms tend to frustrate realistic expectations of cause-
and-effect logic. Influenced by Chekhovian techniques that combine
realistic detail with a Romantic poetic lyricism, the modernist story
interiorized and subjectivized notions such as plot and design.
It was “in or about December 1910”, to use Virginia Woolf’s80
famous commemoration of the post-Impressionist exhibition of
Cézanne, van Gogh, and Matisse in England, that a drastic change in
contemporary sensibility took place that was to affect not only the
visual arts, but also the conception of poetry, the novel and the short
story. In these disciplines, conventional discourse or narrative was
abandoned in favor of a style that registered fleeting impressions,
moods, feelings and atmosphere. The new shift in sensibility was also
marked by the influence of impressionism, which fuses a Romantic
subjectivity with the objectivity of realism in order to “fix the last fine
shade”81 of mood and feeling. The short story becomes, then, the
appropriate medium in which to discriminate feeling and render the
nuances of emotions of le moi profond. As Suzanne Ferguson
remarks, in this period “imitation of how things feel or seem to

77
May, “The Metaphoric Motivation in Short Fiction”, 62.
78
Ibid., 65. Santiago Guerrero Rodríguez-Strachan, “Récit, story, tale, novella”, in
Romantic Prose Fiction, eds G. Gillespie et al., Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2008, 364-
82.
79
May, “The Metaphoric Motivation in Short Fiction”, 67. See also May, The Reality
of Artifice, 18-22.
80
Virginia Woolf, “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown”, in Collected Essays, London:
Chatto and Windus, 1966, I, 320.
81
Arthur Symons, “The Decadent Movement in Literature”, Harper’s New Monthly
Magazine, XXVI, November 1893: http://homepage.mac.com/brendanking/huys
mans.org/criticism/harpers.htm
18 Viorica Patea

characters is preferred [to] … the imitation of what things are in the

real world”.82
With the rise of impressionism, reliance on traditional elements of
plot or on temporal sequences of cause and effect gives way to the
presentation of sensations and inner experience. The modernist
narrative thus develops as a mosaic of feelings, moods and
impressions rather than a sequential narrative. Privileging “objective
correlatives for abstract states of mind and feeling”,83 the modernist
short story becomes bound by images, symbols and themes. Intensity
derives not from plot but, rather, from strategies of point of view,
effects of imagery and tone, or formal and stylistic economy. Mood
and atmosphere supplant events and articulate the structure of the
story. Plot, conventional narrative strategies or marvelous occurrences
are replaced by moments of heightened awareness.
Joyce’s most important contribution to the theory and technique of
the modern narrative is his notion of epiphany,84 a variation on the
Romantic moment of insight into the nature of reality and experience,
Wordsworth’s passionate desire to “see into the life of things”.85
Robert Langbaum defines the Romantic epiphany as a “manifestation
in and through the visible world of an invisible life”.86 In its modernist
instantiation, this moment of insight still unveils the hidden structures
of the real, but its spiritual affinities and secret intimations induce
wonder without necessarily being otherworldly. The epiphany
becomes the focus and the structural device of a modernist story form
that distrusts plot and elements of narrative sequence.87
Fragmentary, static, capturing a fleeting moment, a mood or a
nuance, the modern short story thus turns into a story without a

82
Suzanne Ferguson, “Defining the Short Story, Impressionism and Form”, in May,
The New Short Story Theories, 220.
83
Hanson, Short Stories and Short Fictions, 4.
84
Joyce defined the epiphany as “a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the
vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself” (James
Joyce, Stephen Hero, ed. Theodore Spencer, New York: New Directions, 1944, 51).
85
William Wordsworth, “Lines Composed a Few Lines above Tintern Abbey, on
Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798” (ll. 46-48): “While
with an eye of made quiet by the power / Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, /
We see into the life of things” (William Wordsworth, The Poems, ed. John Hayden,
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977, I, 359).
86
Robert Langbaum, Poetry of Experience, Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1957, 46.
87
Ferguson, “Defining the Short Story”, 225.
 The Short Story: An Overview 19

story.88 It becomes a site for recognitions of states of consciousness

and impressionistic perceptions of reality, reflecting a multiplicity of
points of view, with characters conceived mainly as registers of
different, changing moods. The short story reflects the spirit of
contemporary relativism. Its emphasis on both single moments of
awareness and the fragment marks a mentality in which fixed, stable
concepts are abandoned in favor of the vision of a modern world in
which “all that is solid melts into air”.89 This modest aspiration for the
short story, which renounces overarching structures in favor of
momentary impressions, results from an increasing epistemological
skepticism and relativism in twentieth-century authors, many of
whom are deeply troubled about the human capacity to apprehend the
truth. It expresses an awareness that, in a fragmented and splintered
world, wholeness is no longer possible.
With its brief, fragmentary, inconclusive form, the modernist short
story expresses the limits of human knowledge in a world that holds
no absolutes. Reflecting our restrained processes of cognition, the
short form renders perception in a mode close to the way in which we
experience and know the world: occasionally, in fragments, through
glimpses, or, as Gordimer writes, in “a flash of fireflies, in and out,
now here, now there, in darkness”. In the modernist period, human
cognition is seen to stop short of absolute truths and to take place only
in momentary, spontaneous flashes, in “discrete moment[s] of truth”.90
In this the modern short story resembles modern poetry, which, in its
attempt to offer a “momentary stay against confusion”, also
represents, to use Robert Frost’s words, only a provisional
“clarification of life”.91
With their play with intertextuality, collage, and issues of
originality and authorship, postmodern short stories have become,
even more than their modernist models, plotless antistories.
Postmodern writers are conscious that short stories are verbally
constructed artifacts that focus on the reality of illusions of the real.

88
Bader, “The Structure of the Modern Short Story”, 105.
89
In his analysis of modernity, Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The
Experience of Modernity (1982), rpt. London: Penguin, 1988, paraphrases Marx’s
expression in the Communist Manifesto (1848).
90
Nadine Gordimer, “The Flash of Fireflies”, in May, The New Short Story Theories,
179.
91
Robert Frost, “The Figure the Poem Makes”, in Selected Prose of Robert Frost, eds
Hyde Cox and Edward Connery Lathem, New York: Collier Books, 1956, 18.
20 Viorica Patea

They thus make artistic conventions and artistic devices the subject of
their fiction. Writers such as the postmodernists John Barth and
Donald Barthelme, or the minimalists Raymond Carver, Robert
Coover, or Tobias Wolff, among many others, brought about a revival
of the short story genre in the eighties. One of the newest and most
interesting twenty-first-century manifestations of the short story
comes with the emergence of minifiction and minifiction sequences,
which expand even further the original hybridity of the genre.
Oscillating between modernist forms of writing and postmodernist
ones, minifictions mark a new phase in the evolution of the short
story. Flash fiction, sudden fiction, microfiction, micro-story, short
short, postcard fiction, prosetry and short short story are new forms
that distinguish themselves by extreme brevity proliferate.92 Situated
at the boundary between the literary and the nonliterary, narration and
essay, narration and poetry, and essay and poetry, minifictions also
integrate extraliterary elements and so demand a reformulation of
canonical genre boundaries and definitions. Hybrid, protean and
fragmentary, minifictions introduce a new simultaneity of genres and
have been read alternatively as prose poems, essays, chronicles,
allegories or short stories.
Minifictions represent, as Lauro Zavala observes, “a new form of
writing and reading the world” and mark “the beginning of a new
sensitivity”. Distinct from the tradition of the short story, minifiction
is at the same time the latest expression of the genre. Its most notable
development is occurring in the Spanish American context, which
presents a vigorous and flourishing literary tradition of genre
experimentation related to serialization and fragmentation suggesting
new ways in which it may go in the future.

Looking ahead into the twenty-first century

This present collection of articles provides significant theoretical
foundations for a re-evaluation of the short story as well as
reconsiderations of accomplishments of short story writers and their
artistic legacy. Its aim is to explore the main theoretical issues raised

92
Thomas James, Introduction, Sudden Fiction: American Short Stories, 11-14; Flash
Fiction: 72 Very Short Stories, eds Tom Hazuka, Denise Thomas, James Thomas,
New York: W.W. Norton, 1992; Micro Fiction: An Anthology of Fifty Really Short
Stories, ed. Jerome Stern, New York: W.W. Norton, 1996.
 The Short Story: An Overview 21

by the short story as a genre. This volume deals with historical

considerations, problems of definition, issues of form and technique,
and aspects of the contemporary short story. It includes critical
surveys on the development of the short story and discussions of
various types of short stories.
The book brings together theoretical investigations and text-based
direct analysis of the different literary works under scrutiny, which are
examined in the light of different theoretical perspectives that project
short story writing into a wider cultural, literary, and theoretical
context. Theories about genre take place in the form of historical and
aesthetic considerations, ideas about gender and genre, reader-
response experiments, cognitive patterns, sociolinguistics, discourse
analysis, postmodern techniques, and contemporary use of short forms
such as minifictions.
The volume presents cross-generational approaches to the short
story form, combining new work by some of the founders of short
story theory, including Charles May, Farhat Iftekharuddin, Per
Winther, and Lauro Zavala, with essays by a younger generation of
scholars who enthusiastically further and amplify the study of the
genre, offering fresh perceptions on the theory and writing of short
fiction.
The authors explored – Poe, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Katherine
Mansfield, Bernard Malamud, John Updike, Leslie Marmon Silko,
Sandra Cisneros, Donald Barthelme, Tobias Wolff, Margaret Atwood,
and Isabel Allende, among many others – already occupy a central
position in the history of the short story. At the same time this
collection also discusses the work of contemporary short story writers
who are less well known but whose compositions have contributed to
the latest developments of the genre or help to illustrate different
aspects of short story theory: the American, David Leavitt; Canadians
such as Douglas Glover, Guy Vandergaeghe, Katherine Govier, and
Barbara Gowdy; and Luís Bernardo Honwana, António Jacinto,
Baltasar Lopes, three postcolonial writers in Portuguese-speaking
countries.
This volume is composed of sixteen different essays that debate
theoretical issues related to a wide range of short story practices. They
trace the evolution of the short story from Chaucer through the
Romantic writings of Poe and on to postmodern developments and
emerging tendencies of the twenty-first century.
22 Viorica Patea

The articles are divided into four sections. The first group includes
essays concerned with the “The Beginnings of the Short Story and the
Legacy of Poe”. Antonio López Santos analyzes Chaucer’s narrative
formulas and structural elements in “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” and
“The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale” that pave the way for the
structure of the modern short story. Erik van Achter considers the
problems of genre definition of the short story and goes back to Poe’s
seminal paradigm, which remains an inescapable mainstay in
theorizing about the genre, despite the changing fashions and schools
of critical theory. Peter Gibian traces Poe’s legacy as a foundational
model in the development of European aestheticism and decadence,
showing how the peculiar dynamics of reading and reception that are
played out in the American writer’s stories shaped the way these later
authors read Poe, influencing their vision of the process of aesthetic
transmission.
The second section, “The Linguistic Turn”, presents essays that set
short story criticism in relation to cognitive theory, discourse analysis
and linguistics. Pilar Alonso explores the cognitive connections
between the novel and the short story, interpreting the existing
differences and similarities between the two genres in terms of
variations of goals, decisions, focus, scope, and degrees of
elaboration. Per Winther applies notions of discourse analysis to the
processes at work in the writing and reading of short fiction texts and
examines how the concept of framing (circumtextual, intertextual, and
extratextual) can achieve narrative and hermeneutic closure in short
stories. Drawing on considerations of reader-oriented criticism,
Consuelo Montes-Granado analyzes the mixed linguistic identity of
Chicano writing from a literary, sociolinguistic perspective. She
examines Sandra Cisneros’ symbolically charged use of code-
switching and narrative skill within the confines of the short story as a
literary genre.
The third section of this volume, “Borders, Postcolonialism,
Orality, and Gender”, addresses issues of gender and genre, orality,
hybridity, brevity and testimony literature. Carolina Nuñez-Puente
looks at short stories from a feminist and Bakhtinian perspective and
hails Charlotte Perkins Gilman as the creator of a new genre, “the
dialogical feminist short story”. Rebeca Hernández argues that in
postcolonial literature, the letter, irrespective of the form it adopts,
whether that of an autonomous narrative unit or poem, takes on the
 The Short Story: An Overview 23

defining features of the short story, such as orality, marginality, and

short-storyness. María Jesús Hernáez Lerena expands the generic
considerations of the short story through the prism of witness or
testimony literature, a comparison she illustrates by looking at recent
Canadian short fiction. Teresa Gibert provides new insight into the
way in which Margaret Atwood challenges the conventions of the
short story genre and exploits stories’ narrative potential through a
strikingly innovative usage of metaphorical conceptualization.
Just as Chekhov and Guy de Maupassant had a crucial bearing on
the evolution of the modernist short story at the beginning of the
twentieth century, in recent years the short story’s development has
been powerfully influenced by Latin American writers. Hence, this
volume includes two essays on Spanish American short story writers.
Farhat Iftekharuddin’s analysis (located in part 3) of Isabel Allende’s
The Stories of Eva Luna focuses on gender and genre issues based on
the complexity involved in female/male dynamics and argues that the
lyrical and enigmatic nature of the short story reflects the equally
mysterious nature of the feminine. It is followed (in Part 4) by a
survey by Lauro Zavala, who deepens our understanding of
minifiction in the Spanish American tradition, a trend that marks the
literary dawn of the twenty-first century.
The fourth section of this book, “Postmodernism and the Twenty-
first Century: Intertextuality, Minifiction, Serial Narration”, examines
the aesthetics of postmodern short stories and maps the horizon of the
twenty-first century. Luisa María González Rodríguez explores the
techniques of postmodern short fiction. Taking as a case in point
Donald Barthelme’s short stories, she analyzes various postmodern
strategies of subversion of conventional forms of representation, such
as collage and intertextuality. Santiago Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan
throws new light on the rise of minimalism in the works of Tobias
Wolff and considers the strategies of narrative voice that fuse inner
reality with realistic description. The avant-garde of these new forms
is to be found in the Spanish American tradition. Lauro Zavala
furthers the study of minifictions, minifiction cycles, and dispersed
short stories, which are new postmodern instantiations of the genre.
He addresses fundamental problems of theory and literary criticism
and makes an appeal for a new theory of literary genres that relativize
the conventional boundaries of textual unity and generic diversity.
24 Viorica Patea

Just as he has thrown light into the origins and evolution of the
genre which he has helped conceptualize, Charles May, in his essay
here, surveys the present state of the art and adumbrates the contours
of the future. He sketches the map of the contemporary horizon of
American short fiction and considers the works of recent short story
writers such as T.C. Boyle, George Saunders, Rick Bass, Eric
Puchner, Ryan Harty, Julie Orringer, ZZ Packer, Joan Silber, David
Means, Joy Williams, Charles D’Ambrosio, Andrea Barrett, and
Deborah Eisenberg.
The various authors of this volume, scholars from several different
continents, have reflected on wide-ranging aspects of the short story
from multiple perspectives that relate to varying traditions: European,
American, Native American, Canadian, South American, and African.
Looking back to the origins of the short story, the articles in this
volume also throw new light on the future in an attempt to sketch the
emerging panorama of the most recent short story writers and short
story theories.
 Notes on Contributors 329

Coruña, where she teaches courses on English and feminist studies.

She is the author of a book titled Feminism and Dialogics: Charlotte
Perkins Gilman, Meridel Le Sueur, Mikhail M. Bakhtin (2006). She is
currently preparing a second book that reads nominally ethnic
literature from a Bakhtinian-feminist perspective. More concretely,
her current research deals with the works of Sandra Cisneros, Zora
Neale Hurston, Bharati Mukherjee and Leslie Marmon Silko and the
way in which they reconfigure US literature.

Viorica Patea is Associate Professor of American Literature at the

University of Salamanca, where she teaches American and English
literature. Her published books include Entre el mito y la realidad:
Aproximación a la obra poética de Sylvia Plath (1989); a study on
Whitman, La apología de Whitman a favor de la épica de la
modernidad: El Prefacio de 1855 de Hojas de hierba (1999) and a
study of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (2005). She has edited various
collections of essays, such as Critical Essays on the Myth of the
American Adam (2001) and, together with Paul Derrick, Modernism
Revisited: Transgressing Boundaries and Strategies of Renewal in
American Poetry (2007). In addition to poetry, her research interests
include witness literature. In collaboration with Fernando Sánchez
Miret, she has translated from Romanian into Spanish the annotated
edition of El diario de la felicidad by Nicolae Steinhardt (2007) and
Proyectos de Pasado and Las Cuatro estaciones by Ana Blandiana
(2008, 2011). Currently she is working on a book project on the
relationship between poetry and visual arts. At present she is
translating the poems of Ana Blandiana into Spanish and English in
collaboration with the poets Antonio Colinas and Paul Derrick.

Santiago Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan is Associate Professor at

the University of Valladolid (Spain), where he teaches American
literature. His field of research is the American short story and
postcolonial literature. He has published extensively on American
short fiction. He is also interested in the cultural and literary relations
between America and Spain. His publications include Presencia de
Edgar Allan Poe en la literatura española del siglo XIX (1999) and
the coedition of Cuentos insólitos (2000). He has also edited and
translated Henry James’ stories for a volume titled Daisy Miller, Otra
vuelta de tuerca y otras historias (2005) and recently published En
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