A Brief History of Short Story

Chapter One: Plot and Structure

  Aay Foster (Joseph Conrad)

  The Snows Of Kilimanjaro (Ernest Miller Hemingway)

Chapter Two: Character

  Araby (James Joyce)

  A Good Man Is Hard To Find (Flannery OConnor)

Chapter Three: Point of View

  First Confession (Frank OConnor)

  Death In The Woods (Sherwood Anderson)

  Chapter Four: Setting and Atmosphere

  A Sunrise On The Veld (Doris Lessing)

  The Cask Of Amontillado (Edgar Allen Poe)

……

A Brief History of Short Story

I.WHAT IS A SHORT STORY?

Short Story, fictional work depicting one characters inner conflict or conflict with others, usually has one thematic focus.Short stories generally produce a single, focused emotional and intellectual response in the reader.Novels, by contrast, usually depict conflicts among many characters developed through a variety of episodes, stimulating a complexity of responses in the reader.The short story form ranges from “short shorts,” which run in length from a sentence to four pages, to novellas that can easily be 100 pages long and exhibit characteristics of both the short story and the novel.Because some works straddle the definitional lines of these three forms of fiction—short story, novella, and novel—the terms should be regarded as approximate rather than absolute.

Distinctions should be made between short tales and the modern short story as it is usually regarded.Short tales go back to the origins of human speech, and some were written down by the Egyptians as long ago as 2000 bc.They usually dramatize a simple subject and theme and emphasize narrative over characterization; the opposite is true of the modern short story, where characterization, mood, style, and language are often more important than the narrative itself.Distinctions should also be made between commercial and literary fiction within the short story genre.From O.Henry to Stephen King, commercial short fiction has traditionally featured predictable plot formulas, stock characters and conflicts, and superficial treatment of themes.Literary short fiction employs complex techniques to depict the often-irresolvable dilemmas of the human predicament.

II.FORERUNNERS

The most ancient tales are those of Egypt that date from 2000 bc; the fables of the Greek slave Aesop; and the retellings, by the Roman writers Ovid and Lucius Apuleius, of Greek and Asian stories of magical transformations.Besides the perennially popular Indian story collection, the Panchatantra (composed between the 3rd century BC and the 4th century ad), the major Asian collection of nondidactic, nonmoralistic tales is undoubtedly the Arabian Nights, a collection of stories from Persia, Arabia, India, and Egypt that was compiled over hundreds of years.In this collection, a frame tale is employed.A sultan, enraged by his wifes infidelity, orders her executed.He forms a plan to marry a new woman each night and to have each new bride killed the next day.Scheherazade, the daughter of one of the sultans officials, agrees to marry the sultan but crafts a scheme to thwart him.Each night she tells a story so intriguing that the sultan lets her live to the next night in order to hear the end, whereupon she starts another tale.After 1001 nights he relents and lets her live.

……