What is it that makes a short story short?

Once upon a time, no one thought of asking that question. The cave-dwelling storyteller, as E. M. Forster imagines him, simply told, and if he was lucky and able enough to hold his hearers' attention, then they might not kill or eat him. It was incident and excitement, anticipation and suspense, and above all the provision of a satisfying ending that characterized the story as it was embedded in oral culture, and as it prevailed in the short printed prose narrative up until the end of the nineteenth century, at which point something changed, and the question was asked: what is it that makes a short story short?

This book introduces the reader to a broad selection of English-language writers who, in one way or another, whether directly or indirectly, have taken up that question and whose work has been decisive in shaping our understanding of what the modern short story is, and what it is capable of. These writers come from diverse places – England, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Nigeria and Canada (for reasons of space, authors from the United States of America have been excluded, and interested readers are directed instead to Martin Scofield's complementary volume in this series, The Cambridge Introduction to the American Short Story); what connects them to one another can be summed up in the words of the Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen: they have understood the ‘shortness’ of the short story to be something more, something other, than ‘non-extension’; they have treated ‘shortness’, that is to say, as a ‘positive’ quality.