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2 results

  • Chapter 4 - The Best of the Best

  • from Part I - Contexts
  • Edited by Michael J. Collins, King's College London, Gavin Jones, Stanford University
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to the American Short Story
    Published online:
    11 May 2023
    Print publication:
    25 May 2023, pp 62-79

  • Summary

    This chapter examines the literary institutions that helped American short fiction to flourish in the twentieth century and maintain its visibility today. These institutions, from the Best American Short Stories and the New Yorker, to the Pushcart Prize and the National Book Award, form a kind of patchwork canon of American short fiction, a record of the writers most celebrated in their moment and most remembered since. Despite the persistent notion, espoused by artists and scholars alike, that the short story is “the art form best suited for the description” of a diverse and “heterogeneous culture,” these institutions also testify to the fact that the genre has, until very recently, underrepresented women and overlooked racialized writers. This chapter documents the writers that these organizations have consecrated, examining how that patchwork canon has often failed to live up to the ideals of cultural pluralism at the heart of the American short story tradition.

  • The Lag: Technology and Fiction in the Twentieth Century

  • Alexander Manshel
  • Journal:
    PMLA / Publications of the Modern Language Association of America / Volume 135 / Issue 1 / January 2020
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    02 October 2020, pp. 40-58
    Print publication:
    January 2020

  • Literary histories of the twentieth century often emphasize how rapid technological innovation spurred writers to reimagine the novel's form and central concerns. This essay investigates that claim, comparing the presence of various information technologies in American fiction with their nonfictional presence in American households. What this comparison reveals is a pronounced lag: a gap in time between when a new technology becomes ubiquitous in the home and when it becomes ubiquitous in the novel. Moreover, the shape of this lag is consistent across multiple technologies, tracing a normative trajectory of fictional representation over time. Whereas more popular and more prestigious novels travel in tandem for much of the twentieth century with respect to their inclusion of technology, the two subfields diverge substantially at the close of the century, as conceptions of literary prestige become increasingly defined by an opposition to technologies of the present. (AM)