Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- A Note on the Texts
- Introduction
- 1 Early-Modern Diversity: The Origins of English Short Fiction
- 2 Short Prose Narratives of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
- 3 Gothic and Victorian Supernatural Tales
- 4 The Victorian Potboiler: Novelists Writing Short Stories
- 5 Fable, Myth and Folk Tale: The Writing of Oral and Traditional Story Forms
- 6 The Colonial Short Story, Adventure and the Exotic
- 7 The Yellow Book Circle and the Culture of the Literary Magazine
- 8 The Modernist Short Story: Fractured Perspectives
- 9 War Stories: The Short Story in the First and Second World Wars
- 10 The Short Story in Ireland to 1945: A National Literature
- 11 The Short Story in Ireland since 1945: A Modernizing Tradition
- 12 The Short Story in Scotland: From Oral Tale to Dialectal Style
- 13 The Short Story in Wales: Cultivated Regionalism
- 14 The Understated Art, English Style
- 15 The Rural Tradition in the English Short Story
- 16 Metropolitan Modernity: Stories of London
- 17 Gender and Genre: Short Fiction, Feminism and Female Experience
- 18 Queer Short Stories: An Inverted History
- 19 Stories of Jewish Identity: Survivors, Exiles and Cosmopolitans
- 20 New Voices: Multicultural Short Stories
- 21 Settler Stories: Postcolonial Short Fiction
- 22 After Empire: Postcolonial Short Fiction and the Oral Tradition
- 23 Ghost Stories and Supernatural Tales
- 24 The Detective Story: Order from Chaos
- 25 Frontiers: Science Fiction and the British Marketplace
- 26 Weird Stories: The Potency of Horror and Fantasy
- 27 Experimentalism: Self-Reflexive and Postmodernist Stories
- 28 Satirical Stories: Estrangement and Social Critique
- 29 Comedic Short Fiction
- 30 Short Story Cycles: Between the Novel and the Story Collection
- 31 The Novella: Between the Novel and the Story
- 32 The Short Story Visualized: Adaptations and Screenplays
- 33 The Short Story Anthology: Shaping the Canon
- 34 The Institution of Creative Writing
- 35 Short Story Futures
- Select Bibliography
- Index
- References
14 - The Understated Art, English Style
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 November 2016
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- A Note on the Texts
- Introduction
- 1 Early-Modern Diversity: The Origins of English Short Fiction
- 2 Short Prose Narratives of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
- 3 Gothic and Victorian Supernatural Tales
- 4 The Victorian Potboiler: Novelists Writing Short Stories
- 5 Fable, Myth and Folk Tale: The Writing of Oral and Traditional Story Forms
- 6 The Colonial Short Story, Adventure and the Exotic
- 7 The Yellow Book Circle and the Culture of the Literary Magazine
- 8 The Modernist Short Story: Fractured Perspectives
- 9 War Stories: The Short Story in the First and Second World Wars
- 10 The Short Story in Ireland to 1945: A National Literature
- 11 The Short Story in Ireland since 1945: A Modernizing Tradition
- 12 The Short Story in Scotland: From Oral Tale to Dialectal Style
- 13 The Short Story in Wales: Cultivated Regionalism
- 14 The Understated Art, English Style
- 15 The Rural Tradition in the English Short Story
- 16 Metropolitan Modernity: Stories of London
- 17 Gender and Genre: Short Fiction, Feminism and Female Experience
- 18 Queer Short Stories: An Inverted History
- 19 Stories of Jewish Identity: Survivors, Exiles and Cosmopolitans
- 20 New Voices: Multicultural Short Stories
- 21 Settler Stories: Postcolonial Short Fiction
- 22 After Empire: Postcolonial Short Fiction and the Oral Tradition
- 23 Ghost Stories and Supernatural Tales
- 24 The Detective Story: Order from Chaos
- 25 Frontiers: Science Fiction and the British Marketplace
- 26 Weird Stories: The Potency of Horror and Fantasy
- 27 Experimentalism: Self-Reflexive and Postmodernist Stories
- 28 Satirical Stories: Estrangement and Social Critique
- 29 Comedic Short Fiction
- 30 Short Story Cycles: Between the Novel and the Story Collection
- 31 The Novella: Between the Novel and the Story
- 32 The Short Story Visualized: Adaptations and Screenplays
- 33 The Short Story Anthology: Shaping the Canon
- 34 The Institution of Creative Writing
- 35 Short Story Futures
- Select Bibliography
- Index
- References
Summary
The writers discussed in this chapter form a unique group in the history of modern British fiction. Most were born during the rise of high modernism and came to maturity during its flourishing decade, the 1920s, yet, with a few exceptions, they have seldom been included in discussions of modernism, or in considerations of the ‘Auden generation’. If anything, they might be called second generation modernists, for their stories – influenced by the stark realism of Maupassant, the open-ended poetics of Chekhov and the sexual politics of D. H. Lawrence – often seemed unconventional to magazine editors and contemporary readers. Nevertheless, they embodied in many ways the fears of some high modernists, springing as they did from the lower middle classes, educated not in public schools and universities but in the newly created grammar schools, earning their living by their pens. Except for Lawrence and Graham Greene, the writers discussed here were not intellectuals; they had no overriding theories of politics, economics and sociology, though inevitably their stories touch on these issues. With a few exceptions, they resembled E. M. Forster's Leonard Bast – struggling to move upwards culturally by locating themselves between the extremes of popular genres (mystery, adventure and romance) and the experiments of The Yellow Book, Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway.
As most of these writers came to maturity between the World Wars, they reacted to the mass murder of the First World War by focusing on the individual, but, unlike the modernists, they found much of their inspiration among the people of the small towns and farms outside London. Jed Esty argues that the ‘metropolitan modernists’ (T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Forster) turned away from internationalism, fragmentation and the city in the 1930s to focus on an inward-looking, non-imperial England. Following Esty's lead, we might postulate that the writers discussed here also focused inwardly on individuals at the margins of society, as Frank O'Connor's theory of the story claims. Like the modernists, they often delved into their characters’ internal lives and found complex, unstable characters, but the traditional omniscient or first person, or occasionally the free-indirect, points of view – not stream of consciousness – were the staples of their narrative repertoire.
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- The Cambridge History of the English Short Story , pp. 235 - 251Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2016
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