The Short Story: An Overview

The Short Story: An Overview of the History and Evolution of the Genre

A story conveys meaning that cannot be expressed in any other form; every word is essential.
The meaning of fiction is experiential, not abstract.
Statements about a story's meaning should enhance the reader's experience of it.

Theory and History of the Form

Elizabeth Bowen (1937) considered the short story a young art form, contemporary with cinema and photography.
Mary Rohrberger stated that short narrative fiction is as old as literature itself, but the short story as we know it is the newest genre.
The origins can be traced to: myth and biblical narratives, medieval sermons and romance, fables, folktales, ballads, and the German Gothic of the 18th century.
These mythic origins were filtered through Romanticism and then reconciled with realism's conventions of mimesis and vraisemblance (truth or reality).
Charles May suggests that the short story has always been a hybrid, blending the metaphoric mode of romance with the metonymic mode of realism.
Despite being a distinct form, the short story has been theoretically neglected compared to poetry, drama, the epic, and the novel.
May argues a genre truly exists when its conventions are articulated within the broader context of literature.
For the short story, this process was long-delayed.
Until about 50 years ago, theorists were primarily practitioners: Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Anton Chekhov in the 19th century; Henry James, Flannery O’Connor, Julio Cortázar, and Eudora Welty in the 20th century.
Interest in the short story has grown since the 1960s, with critical and theoretical studies flourishing since the late 20th century.

Poe's Contribution

Poe's critical essays in the mid-19th century are considered the birth of the short story as a unique genre.
He addressed form, style, length, design, authorial goals, and reader affect, setting the framework for modern discussions.
Poe ranked the short story second only to the lyric form.
He emphasized tension, brevity and intensity, creating a strong "undercurrent of suggestion."
Poe considered endings crucial and defined the short story by the reading experience.

Formal Structure

The traditional view is that the short story is a compressed, unified, and plotted form.
Theoretical discussions explore totality, brevity, intensity, suggestiveness, unity of effect, closure, and design.
Formal structure became a focus in 20th-century criticism.
The aesthetics of the genre attracted critics and narrative theorists in the Sixties, concurrent with the dissemination of Russian Formalist writings (Boris Éjxenbaum, Viktor Shklovsky), the rise of structuralism (Vladimir Propp) and anthropology (Claude Lévi-Strauss), and the philosophy of culture (Ernest Cassirer).
The rise of short story theory further developed alongside narratology, reader-response criticism, discourse analysis, and cognitive science.

Pioneering Works

Frank O’Connor’s A Lonely Voice (1963) and Mary Rohrberger’s Hawthorne and the Modern Short Story (1966) were early theoretical analyses, influenced by Brander Matthews’ The Philosophy of the Short-Story (1901).

Charles May

Charles May’s Short Story Theories (1976) established the field, summarizing perspectives and opening new research avenues.
His New Short Story Theories (1994) became a sourcebook and compendium for current analysis.
May’s The Reality of Artifice (1995) provided a critical history, tracing the short story’s origins, shape, influences, and evolution.

Further Contributions

Susan Lohafer’s Coming to Terms with the Short Story (1983) and co-edited volumes, Short Story Theories at a Crossroads (1989) and The Tales We Tell: Perspectives on the Short Story (1998), grounded the short story in cognitive patterns.
Lohafer links "storyness" to closural elements and analyzes reader perception of storyness and preclosure.
John Gerlach’s Toward the End: Closure and Structure in the American Short Story (1985) builds a system of narrative closural categories, based on the idea that endings condition our reading of the entire text.

Short Story Cycles

Studies of autonomous short stories within volumes introduced a new genre, termed the “short story cycle” (Forrest Ingram, 1971), the “short story sequence” (Luscher, 1989) and the “short story composite” (Lundén, 1999).
Rolf Lundén argues that short story composites go back to Boccaccio’s Decameron and Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, drawing on interrelated stories and episodes from sagas and epics.
Modern examples include James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914), Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time (1925), William Faulkner’s Go Down Moses (1942), and Eudora Welty’s Golden Apples (1949).
The specificity expresses tension between “variety and unity, separateness and interconnectedness, fragmentation and continuity, openness and closure”.
Studies focus on textual strategies, networks of association, and patterns that bridge individual stories, suggesting links to sonnet sequences, music, and lyric poetry.

Modernism and Postmodernism

Studies from the 1980s examined short fiction in different schools and periods, such as modernism and postmodernism.
Clare Hanson’s Short Stories and Short Fictions, 1880-1980 (1985), her collection Re-reading the Short Story (1989), and Dominic Head’s The Modernist Short Story (1992) analyze how modernism changed fiction, replacing plot with mood, impressions, and moments of awareness.
Farhat Iftekharrudin’s The Postmodern Short Story: Forms and Issues (2003) explores the genre's evolution in postmodern forms, exploring illusions and making artistic devices the subject.
W.H. New’s Dreams of Speech and Violence: The Art of the Short Story in Canada and New Zealand (1987), and Gerald Lynch’s The One and the Many: English-Canadian Short Story Cycles (2001), explored genre developments from a postcolonial perspective.

Institutional Recognition

In the 1980s, Twayne inaugurated series on short fiction and its critical history.
Special issues 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 was initiated in 1989.
By 1994, with the founding of the journal Short Story, the genre constituted an autonomous field of study.

The Architecture of the Short Story: Aspects of Structure and Form

Theories about the short story tend to be “interdisciplinary and gender-bending”.
Discussions relate the form to myth, folklore, romance, genre theory, cognitive science, narratology, discourse analysis, and visual arts.
It is seen as mediating between the lyric and the novel, exhibiting great variety.
Penn affirms, the short story “has genres of its own invention”.
It is related to the essay (Hesse), the letter (Pasco), cinema (Bowen, Bates), photography (Cortázar), and painting and the visual arts (Hanson).

Marginalization and Subversion

Theoretical neglect made the short story appear “a form at the margins”.
Seen as ex-centric and low in the hierarchy of arts, it began to be invested with subversive powers.
Frank O’Connor defined the short story as the “lonely voice” of “outlawed figures wandering about the fringes of society”.
He believed that the genre never had a hero, and its protagonists are collective groups of submerged populations.
Marie Louise Pratt links the short story with regional, gender, and political marginalization.
She argues the form flourishes in regions where new groups affirm their voice within emerging national literatures or in decolonization.
Clare Hanson endowed the form with the capacity of expressing the repressed knowledge of a dominant culture.
These critics argue the short story thrives in societies without fixed cultural frameworks, in colonial contexts, and is linked to marginal people, women, or outsiders plagued by exile and existential isolation.
The volatility of class structure accounts for its experimental nature.

Defining the Short Story

Defining the short story has proven problematic due to its varying crossroads.
Attempts at definition have been diverse: unity (Poe, Brander Matthews), brevity, intensity and tension (Oates, Bader, Friedman, Cortázar), lyricism (Lukács, Moravia), theme (O’Connor’s “human loneliness), insight, vision and mystery (Éjxenbaum, May, Rohrberger), hybridity (May, Pratt), fractals (Leslie Marmon Silko), and closure (Lohafer, Gerlach).
Nevertheless, it is still difficult to determine which features distinguish it from other genres and account for its unique nature.
Different issues and perspectives inform the discourse: origin in myth and oral storytelling (May); focus on the ineffable (Rohrberger); issues of length in minimalism (Zavala); concern with fragments, closure or frames (Reid, Winther); or generic affinities with the novel, lyric, autobiography, letter-writing, etc.
Charles May observes that among the most challenging generic issues remain the relationship between sequence and significance, mystery and pattern, the fusion of the trivial and the significant, and the eschewal of explications.

Defining Characteristics

In the 1980s, some critics doubted that a definition was possible, but Charles May hoped to provide one through Wittgensteinian family resemblance theories, assuming clusters of qualities and characteristics.
Boris Éjxenbaum considered the short story a primary elemental form with strong ties to myth, characterized by compression and concentration, stating, “The story is a riddle.”
He believed the novel and short story are fundamentally at odds, with the short story being elementary and the novel syncretic.
He also stated that 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.
$story = singleEquation(oneUnknown)$
$novel = systemOfEquations(variousUnknowns)$
Generic considerations focus on its split allegiances to narrative and lyric.
It shares prose with the novel but uses poetry’s metaphorical language and strategies of indirection and suggestion.
It possesses storyness, narrativity, intensity, tension, compression and suggestion of the lyric mode.
It blends the brevity and intensity of the lyric with narrative features such as plot, denouement, character, and events.
It operates through oblique telling, ellipsis, and implication, avoiding explicit statements and causal effects.
The short story emphasizes tone and imagery, and its economy targets intensity, suggestiveness, and lyricism.

Fusion of Antagonistic Traits

The fusion of these traits accounts for the singular effects of the short story, which Poe considered a unique narrative form.
Georg Lukács argues that the lyric nature of the short story results from selection, a “form-giving, structuring, delimitating act” that emphasizes the “strangeness and ambiguity of life”.
The lyric element is inherent in its compact form, and selection charges trivial details with meaning.
More stylized than the novel, it distorts everyday reality and operates through intuition and lyric effects.
Lyricism derives from tension and intensity and is present even in realistic stories.
Unlike the more “public” novel, the short story remains “romantic, individualistic and intransigent”, the affair of a lonely voice.

Brevity and Perception

Poe argued that, like the lyric poem, the short story should be read at one sitting.
Its compressed structure lends itself to pictorial perceptions and spatial terms.
Brevity invites analogy with visual arts like painting and photography, differentiating it from the temporality of the novel.
While the novel presents “a full and authentic report of human experience”, the short story deals only with a fragment, an incident, a small-scale event.
In contrast to the novel, it concentrates on a moment of awareness rather than a completed action.
It does not attempt to embrace the whole of experience but presents “slices” or “snapshots” of reality.

Glimpses and Meaning

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 writer’s task is to “invest[ing] the glimpse with all that is in his power”.
This moment seeks meaning beyond the contingent and particular, striving for something general and universal that is left unstated.

Photography Metaphor

Julio Cortázar compares the novel to motion pictures and the short story to photography.
The novel is “an open order”, while the short story isolates a fragment, circumscribes it, and uses its limitations to open it up to a more ample reality.
Photography presents a dynamic vision that spiritually transcends the space reached by the camera.

Tension and Intensity

Charles May observes transforming a story into something significant requires intensity and tension.
These result from the compactness of the form, its economy, and its oblique, elliptical, and concise style.
Carver contends that tension 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”.

Brevity and Style

The aesthetics of brevity imposes limitations affecting epistemology and style; it prevents cumulative effects and extended explanations.
The aesthetics of economy accounts for its cryptic and elliptical nature.
Writers cannot indulge in details.
Compactness and conciseness lead to fragmentariness, describing moments instead of processes, and outlines instead of detailed events.
The very shortness requires a style that goes against mimetic principles, eluding the trivial, and avoiding causal relationships.

The Power of the Ordinary

Short fiction accommodates commonplace things and events, but the ordinary is never allowed to remain so.
Raymond Carver observes that prosaic elements have to be endowed “with immense, even startling power”.
Details need to be invested with implication, suggestiveness, and general significance.
The effect of brevity is relevance, intensity, and tension.
Since the writer cannot resort to elaborate statements, the challenge is to make “the concrete work double time”.
Brevity deforms the real and imposes stylization and greater design.

Defamiliarization

José Ortega y Gasset argues that artistic technique involves distortion and defamiliarization of everyday reality.
Brevity generates concentration, compression, and intensity, countering mimetic conceptions and emphasizing stylization.
Strategies of brevity and concentration are responsible for the short story’s formalized style.
Since tension and intensity are constitutive traits, even realistic works present stylized representations of experience.

Omission and Exclusion

Chekhov’s dictum – “In the short stories it is better to say not enough than to say too much” – anticipates modernism and Hemingway’s iceberg theory.
John Barth observed that the short story inclines towards exclusion.
The elimination of intermediary links and tightly wrought unity invite readers to seek something hinted at or hidden.

Quintessential Reality

The short form yearns towards a quintessential reality beyond everyday particulars.
Relying on intensity and tension, it aspires to transpose the incommunicable into aesthetic forms.
Cortázar remarks that it illuminates something beyond itself, converting a common occurrence into a summary of the human condition.

Exceptional Experience

Critics and writers agree that short stories concern an exceptional, mysterious, strange, unexpected, or unusual experience.
Walter Benjamin argues that it dwells on mysteries that contradict logic and plausibility.
Writers like Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, and Julio Cortázar emphasize the mystery at the heart of the short story.
The dynamics rest on the clash between everyday experiences and a hidden reality that unsettles certainties.

Epiphany

The philosophy suggests the merging of the idea and the real at the moment of revelation, an epiphany.
Critics note the potential to challenge truth notions and dwell on moments of breakup in experience.
The short story conflates time and upsets Cartesian thought.

Time and Synthesis

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”.
Cortázar says the short story offers “a live synthesis … something like the shimmering water in a glass, the fleeting within the permanent”.
Flannery O’Connor states that the challenge for the writer in making the action describe as much of the mystery of existence as possible.
Welty confirms that “we can’t really see the solid outlines” of a short story but that it seems wrapped in an atmosphere.

Mystery

Mystery is the effect of brevity and reliance on pattern and structure.
It proceeds not only from mythical or romantic affinities but also from the compactness, intensity, and economy of its short form.
The mysterious is provoked by readers' intuitions of an unresolved reality, amplified in the absence of explanatory elements.

The Nature of the Real

The short story probes the nature of the real, which proves more complex than mere appearances.
Melville associated Hawthorne’s tales with telling the truth, seeing the actual world as a façade.
The fictive world led to truth, from the surface of reality to the core of meaning.

Epistemology of Revelation

Theorists agree that the epistemology of the short story is one of revelation, vision, or insight.
The fundamental element resides not in narrative structure but in “the moment of truth” conducive to heightened awareness, a momentary realization that marks the passage from ignorance to knowledge.
Cortázar remarks that a story is meaningful when it ruptures its own limits with an explosion of spiritual energy, illuminating something beyond the anecdote.
The short story shares the property of bringing a fragment to the point of translucency, rendering a moment. Whose intensity makes it seem outside the ordinary stream of time and whose significance lies outside the ordinary range of experience.
The dramatization of this moment can belong to the marvelous, psychological, or hidden aspects of everyday life.
Flannery O’Connor remarks that short story writers make alive experiences we are not accustomed to observing everyday.
The short story deals with dreams or fears or psychological obsessions, the marvelous, the fantastic, the absurd.
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.
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 contribution to world literature.
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.
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.

Modernist Shift

If the nineteenth-century short story was mainly dramatic and relied heavily on plot, the modernist short story came to renounce narrative structure.
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.

Impressionism and Subjectivity

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” 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.
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.

Objective Correlatives and Epiphany

Privileging “Objective correlatives for abstract states of mind and feeling 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, a variation on the Romantic moment of insight into the nature of reality and experience.
Robert Langbaum defines the Romantic epiphany as a manifestation in and through the visible world of an invisible life.
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.

Characteristics of the Modern Short Story

Fragmentary, static, capturing a fleeting moment, a mood or a nuance, the modern short story thus turns into a story without a story as well as 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”.
This 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 which, 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”.

Modern Poetry

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”.
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.

Postmodernism

Postmodern writers are conscious that short stories are verbally constructed artifacts that focus on the reality of illusions of the real.
They thus make artistic conventions and artistic devices the subject of their fiction.
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.

Minifictions

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.
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.

A New Sensibility

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 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 and 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 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 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.
This volume debates theoretical issues related to a wide range of short story practices and 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.
These articles are divided into four sections.

The Beginnings of the Short Story and the Legacy of Poe

This section 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 Linguistic Turn

This section 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.

Borders, Postcolonialism, Orality, and Gender

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 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.

Latin American Influence

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.
Farhat Iftekharuddin’s analysis 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.

Postmodernism and Minifiction

The fourth section of this book examines techniques of the aesthetics of postmodern short stories.
Luisa María González Rodríguez explores the techniques of postmodern short fiction through 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 Wolfe and considers the strategies of narrative voice that fuse inner reality with realistic description.
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.

Horizon of American Short Fiction

Charles May surveys the present state 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 of American short fiction and considers the works.

Conclusion

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.