SHORT STORY

brief fictional prose narrative that is shorter than a novel and that usually deals with only a few characters. The short story is usually concerned with a single effect conveyed in only one or a few significant episodes or scenes. The form encourages economy of setting and concise narrative; character is disclosed in action and dramatic encounter but is seldom fully developed. Before the 19th century the short story was not generally regarded as a distinct literary form. But although in this sense it may seem to be a uniquely modern genre, the fact is that short prose fiction is nearly as old as language itself. Throughout history man has enjoyed various types of brief narratives: jests, anecdotes, studied digressions, short allegorical romances, moralizing fairy tales, short myths, and abbreviated historical legends. None of these constitutes a short story as the 19th and 20th centuries have defined the term, but they do make up a large part of the milieu from which the modern short story emerged. The short stories of particular literary cultures, along with other genres, are discussed in articles such as Western literature; and in articles on the arts of various peoplese.g., South Asian arts. brief fictional prose narrative that is shorter than a novel and that usually deals with only a few characters. The short story is usually concerned with a single effect conveyed in only one or a few significant episodes or scenes. The form encourages economy of setting and concise narrative; character is disclosed in action and dramatic encounter but is seldom fully developed. The short story had its precedents in ancient Greek fables and brief romances, the tales of the Arabian Nights, and the earthily realistic middle-class fabliaux of Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni Boccaccio that were inserted within longer narratives. Short stories did not really emerge as a distinct literary genre until the early 19th century, however. Their development seems to have been prompted both by literary Romanticism and by literary realism. Romanticism stimulated interest in the strange and fantastic, in abnormal sensation and heightened experience that could be explored within the compass of a brief prose narrative but had not the duration appropriate to the scale of the novel. Meanwhile, realist fiction was aspiring to the function of investigative journalism, reporting on unfamiliar, unattractive, or neglected aspects of the contemporary situation with scrupulous objectivity. The first true collections of short stories began to appear almost simultaneously in Germany, the United States, Russia, and France in the second and third decades of the 19th century. In Germany the tales of Heinrich von Kleist and E.T.A. Hoffmann made use of the fabulous as a means of exploring psychological and metaphysical problems. Washington Irving's The Sketch Book (181920) marked the beginning of the American short story. He was followed in the 1830s by Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, the best American story writers in the first half of the 19th century. Poe wrote many classic tales of horror and virtually invented the detective story. In his Twice-Told Tales (1837) Hawthorne displayed a Puritan-derived fascination with the ordeals of individual experience, particularly the experience of evil. At almost the same time, Aleksandr Pushkin and Nikolay Gogol in Russia turned to the short story, where their attention to the details of ordinary life contrasted sharply with that of the fantastic and legendary which had been exploited by their German and American predecessors. Prosper Mrime, Honor de Balzac, and Thophile Gautier were the first significant French short-story writers. They grounded their stories in realism and emphasized clear and dispassionate observation, vivid detail, and precise use of language. Herman Melville in The Piazza Tales (1856) followed Hawthorne in endowing the American short story with hitherto unexplored moral dimensions. The Russian tradition, meanwhile, reached an early maturity in the work of Ivan Turgenev, whose first and finest short-story collection, A Sportsman's Sketches (1852), took as its main subject the ordinary circumstances of peasant life. Each of his stories catches a character in a particularly revealing incident that illuminates his entire life by means of deceptively casual observations. Guy de Maupassant in the 1880s endowed his short stories with a compression, an economy of detail, and a vivid precision of style that were typically French. His ingeniously constructed plots and striking climaxes were imitated by writers on both sides of the Atlantic. The Russian writer Anton Chekhov, by contrast, relied, as had his predecessor Turgenev, on revealing human character not through striking incidents but by a subtle examination of their situations in an unobtrusive, almost journalistic fashion. Leo Tolstoy also wrote a few great short stories that carry his peculiar moral emphasis. Short stories were often published in the first instance in magazines and newspapers, which encouraged the element of journalistic local colour in stories by the American writers Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Hamlin Garland, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Joel Chandler Harris. The principal American short-story writer of the second half of the 19th century, however, was Henry James, whose subtle psychological observations and preoccupation with literary form influenced both American and English writers after World War I. About the turn of the century Rudyard Kipling emerged as the first important British short-story writer. His colourful, well-plotted stories abound in flamboyant effects and striking incidents of British colonial life. But it was only after World War I that the short story truly flourished in Britain. The major novelists of this periodJoseph Conrad, James Joyce, E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolfshowed an awareness of the short-story form that their 19th-century counterparts had lacked. Joyce's Dubliners (1914) was an especially influential collection of stories, and the New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield was also influential. But it was W. Somerset Maugham who had the widest public of any English short-story writer throughout much of the 20th century. Sleek objectivity and an incisive dissection of human frailties are the mark of his stories. Subsequent British story writers included V.S. Pritchett, Graham Greene, H.E. Bates, and Elizabeth Bowen. The American short story proved similarly rich in the 20th century. Stephen Crane, Jack London, O. Henry, and Sherwood Anderson were its principal practitioners early in the century. And as in England, the major novelistsErnest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and Robert Penn Warrenwere equally adept at both the short story and the novel. American short stories often showed a preoccupation with the qualities of regional life, as is evident in the works of such Southerners as Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O'Connor. The appeal of short stories continued to grow throughout the 20th century, and countries that had previously exerted little influence on the genre produced innovative and commanding writers. Among these were Franz Kafka of Czechoslovakia, Jorge Luis Borges of Argentina, and Akutagawa Ryunosuke of Japan. The German novelist Thomas Mann proved to be one of the 20th century's greatest creators of short fiction. Additional reading K.P. Kempton examines the genre of the short story, emphasizing theme and meaning, in The Short Story (1947). An excellent analysis of story techniques is offered in Sean O'Faolain, The Short Story (1948). Brander Matthews, The Philosophy of the Short Story (1901, reprinted 1931), is predicated on Edgar Allen Poe's theories. A provocative thesis regarding the nature of stories is presented in Frank O'Connor, The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story (1963). H.S. Summers has collected some of the more important discussions of the form in Discussions of the Short Story (1963). Storytellers and Their Art, ed. by G. Sampson and C. Burkhart (1963), contains comments of various authors on the form. More specialized discussions of the form are contained in F.L. Pattee, The Development of the American Short Story (1923); R.B. West, Short Story in America, 19001950 (1952); E.K. Bennett, A History of the German Novelle, 2nd ed. rev. by H.M. Waidson (1961); and S. Trenkner, Greek Novella in the Classical Period (1958).