Short Story

A

Early Forms

The term short story usually refers to the modern short story, which evolved out of earlier types of fiction in prose and verse. The earliest ancestors of short stories are ancient tales, simple stories that date back to Egyptian writings that are 6,000 years old. Another early form was the fable, such as those of the 6th-century-bc Greek slave Aesop, each with a lesson to be expressed. There were also popular Greek and Asian stories of magical transformations, many with moralistic, satirical, and pure entertainment aims, which were gathered and retold by the Roman writers Ovid and Lucius Apuleius in the first several centuries ad. The book Arabian Nights, a famous collection of stories from Persia, Arabia, India, and Egypt, was compiled over hundreds of years. In it, the beautiful queen Scheherazade entrances her husband, the sultan, with a new tale every evening, leaving the suspenseful ending for the next day so he will not carry out his vow to kill her.

Tales in great variety flourished in Western Europe during the Middle Ages. Romance tales, in prose or verse, were common in France. Many of the best stories of the Middle Ages were preserved and refined in two 14th-century works, The Decameron by Italian prose writer Giovanni Boccaccio and The Canterbury Tales by English poet Geoffrey Chaucer. They retold fables, epics about beasts, exempla (religious tales), romances, fabliaux (ribald tales), and legends.

Although these types of tales continued to appear in the centuries that followed, there was a considerable drop in the number published. One source of such stories was the 18th-century English magazine The Spectator, where editors Joseph Addison and Sir Richard Steele published many semi-fictional sketches of contemporary character types. A popular tale from the early 19th century was “Rip Van Winkle” (1819) by American writer Washington Irving.

B

New Literary Genre

When the short story emerged as a genre in the 19th century, it was seen as something totally new and modern. Popular and literary magazines began increasingly to publish short stories that often reflected the dominant literary trends of the day. Up to that point, the primary focus of most stories had been on the plot.

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Nathaniel Hawthorne was one of the most important early writers in the shaping of the modern short story. His pieces probed character and the moral significance of events, leaving their physical reality ambiguous. In “Young Goodman Brown” (1846), for example, the dark meetings in the woods of the Salem townspeople are less important than the spiritual changes in Brown himself. In his 1842 review of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales (1837), Edgar Allan Poe became the first writer to define the short story as the attempt to achieve a single, focused effect. Poe demonstrated his artistic theory in “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846), manipulating the setting, character, and dialogue to lead the reader inexorably toward the emotional state most appropriate for the “perfect” murder.

During the 19th century a variety of conflicting visions of life emerged that affected the way short-story writers viewed human experience. There is brooding romanticism—seen and heard also in painting, drama, and music—in the short fictions of Heinrich von Kleist (as in “The Earthquake in Chile,” 1810) and E. T. A. Hoffmann (“The Cremona Violin,” 1818) in Germany; Hawthorne (“The Minister’s Black Veil,” 1836) and Poe (“The Fall of the House of Usher,” 1839) in the United States; Nikolay Gogol (“The Nose,” 1836), Ivan Turgenev (“Byezhin Meadow,” 1852), and Anton Chekhov (“The Darling,” 1899) in Russia; and Honoré de Balzac (“A Passion in the Desert,” 1830) in France. Traditional tales were put to new uses, such as transmitting the folklore and history of a region or a nation, while other stories frankly and realistically depicted everyday life. Regionalism is mingled with psychological realism in the New England short stories of Sarah Orne Jewett (as in “The White Heron,” 1886), the deep South stories of Kate Chopin (“The Story of an Hour,” 1894), and the New York stories of Edith Wharton (“After Holbein,” 1930).

In 1868 French novelist-playwright Émile Zola began to develop the theory of naturalism in literature, viewing human motivation and behavior as scientifically predictable and determined by heredity and environment. The most highly regarded of the naturalistic writers was Guy de Maupassant, also a Frenchman, who wrote nearly 300 short stories in the last half of the 1800s. Determinism and pessimism form the vision of life expressed in Ambrose Bierce’s American Civil War stories (such as “In the Midst of Life,” 1891). A contrasting view was expressed in the symbolist movement in poetry, which mingled universal symbolism with private symbolism to explore psychological states and the potentials of the imagination. Naturalists and symbolists influenced many short-story authors throughout the world. Stephen Crane was one of the first American naturalists but he was also a symbolist (as demonstrated in “The Open Boat,” 1898).

By the early 20th century the short story had matured as a form. The stories of James Joyce (“A Little Cloud,” 1914) and Katherine Mansfield (“Miss Brill,” 1920) show the influence of Chekhov and Henry James but with other elements added, such as impressionism and ironic epiphany. In turn, Joyce and Mansfield were a major influence on the so-called New Yorker magazine story, exemplified in the work of the three Johns, O’Hara (“Do You Like It Here?” 1939), Updike (“Pigeon Feathers,” 1961), and Cheever (“The Swimmer,” 1964). These writers are noted for their dispassionate stories about the ironies of suburban life, reflecting the major shift in American living patterns following World War II (1939-1945). Other major authors of the modern story include Irwin Shaw (“The Girls in Their Summer Dresses,” 1939), J. D. Salinger (“Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” 1948), Anne Beattie (“A Vintage Thunderbird,” 1978), Tobias Wolff (“The Rich Brother,” 1985), Alice Munro (“Meneseteung,” 1989), and Lorrie Moore (“You’re Ugly, Too,” 1990).

C

Innovations

The innovative short story—also known as avant-garde, experimental, or unconventional fiction—has a long history, although its most vital period is the second half of the 20th century into the present. Unlike mainstream short fiction, innovative stories do not rely upon conventional character, conflicts, plots, or other standard elements. They are anti-story—typically lacking realism, plot, a focused subject, or a clear meaning—and they explore events through chaos, randomness, arbitrariness, and fragments.

The modern short story itself was once considered an innovation in fiction, and since the 19th century certain writers have pushed the edges of the form. Gogol fused dream and reality in “The Overcoat” (1842), a story about an insignificant clerk who dies of heartbreak after his new overcoat is stolen but who returns as a ghost to seek justice. The stories of Austro-Czech writer Franz Kafka so uniquely mesh the fantastic with the realistic that the adjective Kafkaesque was created to describe stories that echo his. One of the finest of Kafka’s innovative, fable-like stories is “In the Penal Colony” (1919), which deals with imprisonment and torture. British author Virginia Woolf makes extreme use of the omniscient point of view in the story “Kew Gardens” (1919), in which insects, plants, wind, light, and noise are as important as human beings.

Unconventional short fiction became even more widespread after World War II. In his collection Welcome to the Monkey House (1968), American Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., included several stories that make satirical use of the science fiction genre. One such story is “Harrison Bergeron,” which begins, “The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal.” “The Joker’s Greatest Triumph,” a 1965 work by American Donald Barthelme, relates the ordinary home life of Batman and is an example of the pop story. Italian author Tommaso Landolfi makes use of the biographical form to satirize men’s misuse of women in “Gogol’s Wife” (1954). “Blowup” (1956), by Argentine writer Julio Cortázar, uses the development process of photography to reveal aspects of bizarre events.

The story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” (1981) by American Raymond Carver is an example of minimalism, relying on simple, brief narrative passages woven into seemingly banal dialog to imply deeper layers of meaning. Surrealism, which attempts to represent the subconscious, is at work in French writer Anais Nin’s dream story “Ragtime” (1944). In “How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Correction and Began My life Over Again” (1969), American writer Joyce Carol Oates makes bizarre use of the common essay outline to express the psychic damage done to a teenage girl. One of the strangest forms of innovative fiction is metafiction (fiction that comments upon the act of writing the story the reader is reading), as in the stories “Lost in the Funhouse” (1968) by American John Barth and “The Birds” (1969) by American Ronald Sukenick.

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