The art of brevity : excursions in short fiction theory and analysis / edited by Per Winther, Jakob Lothe, and Hans H. Skei.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Winther, Per, 1947-

Lothe, Jakob.

Skei, Hans H., 1945-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Short story.

Physical Description:

xx, 212 pages, 6 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Columbia : University of South Carolina Press, [2004]

Summary:

The Art of Brevity gathers fresh ideas about the theory and writing of short fiction from around the globe to produce an international, inclusive exploration of the steadily growing field of short story studies. While Anglo-American scholars have served as the primary developers of contemporary short story theory since the field's inception in the 1960s, this volume adds the contributions of scholars living in other parts of the world. Such Anglo-American pioneers as Mary Rohrberger, Charles E. May, Susan Lohafer, and John Gerlach join with short fiction scholars at universities in Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Canada to build academic bridges and expand the field, geographically as well as conceptually.

Contributors to the volume weave together themes of time, space, compression, mystery, reader response, and narrative closure. They discuss writers as varied as Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Sarah Orne Jewett, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemingway, Mavis Gallant, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, and Robert Olen Butler. Among the less familiar topics they investigate are the Australian tall tale, the nineteenth-century queer short story, and contemporary Danish "short shorts."

Contents:

Origins, development, substance, and design of the short story: how I got hooked on the short story and where it led me / Mary Rohrberger

Why short stories are essential and why they are seldom read / Charles E. May

Writing short stories: my double story, with reflections on occasion, tonality, and direction / Andrew K. Kennedy

Real-world characters in fictional story worlds: Robert Olen Butler's 'JFK secretly attends Jackie auction' / Susan Lohafer

Narrative, lyric, and plot in Chris Offutt's Out of the woods / John Gerlach

Closure and preclosure as narrative grid in short story analysis: some methodological suggestions / Per Winther

The illustrated short story: toward a typology / Stuart Sillars

Danish short shorts in the 1990s and the Jena-romantic fragments / Gitte Mose

Aspects of the fragment in Joyce's Dubliners and Kafka's The trial / Jakob Lothe

Short notes on tall tales: some Australian examples / W.H. New

When foreignness and familiarity become one: defamiliarization in some Canadian short stories / Gerd Bjørhovde

Making the familiar strange: representing the house in Sarah Orne Jewett's 'The landscape chamber' and Linda Hogan's 'Friends and fortunes' / Laura Castor

Architexture in short stories by Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty / Jan Nordby Gretlund

A life remembered: store porch tales from Yoknapatawpha county / Hans H. Skei

Faulkner, Welty, and the short story composite / Sandra Lee Kleppe

The queer short story / Axel Nissen

Melville's stories as novel alternative / Hans B. Löfgren

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

1570035571

OCLC:

55502480