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
27 - Experimentalism: Self-Reflexive and Postmodernist Stories
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 short story is a young art’, wrote Elizabeth Bowen in 1937: ‘as we know it’, she contends, ‘it is the child of this century’. It sounds curious to think of short fiction as still in its infancy or at least early adolescence by mid-century, when we recall the form's earlier trailblazers such as Thomas Hardy, Henry James and, of course, Edgar Allan Poe. Bowen must therefore have had some other context of generic transformation in mind, one that affects the story ‘as we know it’ now, rather than as it has come to be known and traditionally valued. Modernism, in her account, changed the short story's conditions of possibility: it now ‘may be said to stand at the edge of prose’, not only because ‘poetic tautness and clarity are so essential to it’ but also because ‘it is nearer drama than the novel’ and nearer still to cinema, whose medium is ‘itself busy with a technique’. Being ‘of the same generation’, both film and short stories ‘have been accelerating together’, such that for Bowen they continue to hold certain ‘affinities’ which are critically instructive: ‘neither is sponsored by a tradition; both are, accordingly, free; both, still, are self-conscious, show a self-imposed discipline and regard for form’.
Bowen draws the literary-historical net quite tight here. And one might question her characterization of short stories as modernism's progeny alone, their progression tied to parallel developments in other idiomatically twentieth-century artistic media. But her emphasis on the formally self-conscious and self-disciplining nature of such narratives would remain prescient in the decades to come. Beginning its map of transitions in the short story some twenty years after Bowen's Faber anthology, this chapter traces the aesthetic consequences of the genre's creative self-reflexivity across an era in which its increasing experimentalism contended at times with its increasing marginalization. However much the short story's popularity fluctuated, stylistic advances in the genre flourished after the Second World War. Writers from Britain and Ireland can't exactly be paralleled with the explicit modes of postmodern self-referentiality that shaped both the topics and the techniques of iconic North American experimentalists like John Barth and Donald Barthelme.
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- The Cambridge History of the English Short Story , pp. 464 - 480Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2016
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