Book contents
- The Cambridge History of American Modernism
- The Cambridge History of American Modernism
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Chronology
- Introduction
- Part I Methodologies
- Part II Forms, Genre, and Media
- 7 New Visual Media
- 8 Midwestern Modernism and the Radio
- 9 Modernist Writing and Painting
- 10 Modern Folk, Modernist Documentary
- 11 Skyscraper Organizations
- 12 The Jazz Age
- 13 Modernism’s Deep Roots
- 14 Modernizing the American Short Story
- 15 Modernist American Long Poems
- 16 The Modernist Lyric and Its Discontents
- 17 Anthologies
- 18 Fragile Realism
- 19 Post-World War II Theater and Media
- 20 The Limits of an American Modernist Avant-Garde
- 21 Magazines
- 22 The Modernist Presses
- 23 Literary Criticism
- 24 Libertad Bajo Palabra
- Part III Situating US Modernism
- Select Bibliography
- Index
14 - Modernizing the American Short Story
from Part II - Forms, Genre, and Media
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 July 2023
- The Cambridge History of American Modernism
- The Cambridge History of American Modernism
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Chronology
- Introduction
- Part I Methodologies
- Part II Forms, Genre, and Media
- 7 New Visual Media
- 8 Midwestern Modernism and the Radio
- 9 Modernist Writing and Painting
- 10 Modern Folk, Modernist Documentary
- 11 Skyscraper Organizations
- 12 The Jazz Age
- 13 Modernism’s Deep Roots
- 14 Modernizing the American Short Story
- 15 Modernist American Long Poems
- 16 The Modernist Lyric and Its Discontents
- 17 Anthologies
- 18 Fragile Realism
- 19 Post-World War II Theater and Media
- 20 The Limits of an American Modernist Avant-Garde
- 21 Magazines
- 22 The Modernist Presses
- 23 Literary Criticism
- 24 Libertad Bajo Palabra
- Part III Situating US Modernism
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
By the beginning of the twentieth century, short-story writing in the US was well established as a form of efficient literary production along the lines that Edgar Allan Poe had established sixty years earlier. One way of understanding the American modernist short story is as an attempt to reinvent the form by restoring the balance that Poe had once advocated: not to forget technique but to make it work again in the service of art understood as both an expressive and an elite activity. This chapter considers some of the ways in which American short-story writers can usefully be said to have developed, modified, or put into question the modern principle of efficiency.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge History of American Modernism , pp. 253 - 267Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023