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.

Chapter three looks at works written during the civil rights era to understand how and why the poor white southerner entered the national spotlight as the face of racism in this era. In this part, I probe the disconnect between the period’s activism and its literature—in other words, I work to make sense of why at the very moment that black civil rights activists were taking on the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, the public transit system of Montgomery, Alabama, and other discriminatory institutions, midcentury southern white women writers were depicting acts of racism perpetrated by isolated individuals located on the ragged margins of southern society. Using evidence from her fictional works as well as her correspondence, I propose that Flannery O’Connor broke rank with her celebrated contemporaries. In her short stories, O’Connor took up specific formal techniques that Harper Lee, Lillian Smith, and Eudora Welty used to depict diabolical poor white men and redeployed them to expose the social blight her contemporaries were at pains to obscure: middle-class racism.

Flynn’s chapter argues for the crucial role of nineteenth-century French naturalism in the conception and evolution of Joyce’s Dubliners. Specifically, it argues that Joyce’s ambition to correct the development of his country through representing the debilitation of its capital city is modelled on Émile Zola’s aim in his naturalist, twenty-novel series Le Rougon-Macquart (1871-1893) to present and diagnose the pathologies of the Third Republic through representing several generations of a diseased family. However, in their indirection, Joyce’s stories expand upon an ambiguity intrinsic to naturalism – the subjectivity inherent in any would-be objective perception of reality – an ambiguity developed to comic effect by the second-generation naturalist, Guy de Maupassant in the story “Auprès d’un Mort” (Beside Schopenhauer’s Corpse). The chapter argues that the first story of Dubliners, “The Sisters,” is inspired by this minutely observed, disenchanted, and enigmatic story. The chapter closes by looking at the final scene of “The Dead” to argue that Joyce turns the dead end of naturalism into a test for an Irish readership.

This chapter explores how the NAACP’s Crisis, the National Urban League’s Opportunity, Abbott’s Monthly and Challenge/New Challenge are representative of the more palpable literary focus on the experiences of the working classes and the poor that occurs in 1930s Black print culture. Along with novels, volumes of poetry, and coverage in the Black press more generally, these literary journals and magazines published explicit depictions of African Americans’ social conditions. As instances of how the New Negro reader of the Harlem Renaissance was recast throughout the decade, The Crisis, Opportunity, Abbott’s Monthly, and Challenge/New Challenge often targeted African Americans as working subjects and intended readers. As the chapter illustrates, the sections of literature, book reviews, editorials/criticism, and correspondence comprising these literary journalsʼ and magazinesʼ 1930s content allowed editors and writers to engage in work that both prioritized literary portrayals of African Americans’ inner lives as maids, cooks, day laborers, and the unemployed and expanded audiences for their developing literary tradition.

The short story as a way into discussions of plot. The event-plot short story. Synchronised (reader and character) moments of discovery as a key pleasure in fiction. Poetic justice. The relationship of the character to the theme. The Chekhovian / slice-of-life / anti-plot short story. Plot is sidelined as a prime focus in favour of narratives reflective of human experience. Plot and time: plot is only available in retrospect and the location of the reader in – and in relationship to – the narrative defines the meaning of the story. Telling it slant: the usefulness of an indirect route to meaning.

‘Plot may depend not so much on a sequence of events unfolding chronologically as on what the protagonists and the reader know about the events and when they know it.’

This chapter argues that the spatialising habits of the short fiction of the period can best be understood in terms not only of a modernist preoccupation with the complex and ambiguous layering of urban milieu, but of its polar opposite: the threat (or promise) of movement, of inter-relation, which unsettles the remote traditional communities portrayed in local colour writing. James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’, Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Bliss’ and ‘The Stranger’, and ‘A Conjugal Episode’, a late story by one of the most successful New Woman novelists, George Egerton (Mary Chavelita Dunne), will be taken to exemplify the first of these tendencies. The second can be shown to include stories about Englishness and empire, by Rudyard Kipling and D. H. Lawrence; stories about migration, by Joseph Conrad and George Moore; and stories about ghosts, by M. R. James and May Sinclair. In either case, short fiction tended to be at its best, and most characteristic, when least forgiving.

In her analysis of the rising prominence of recent short and flash fiction, Angela Naimou considers narrative brevity as an opening to geopolitical and temporal expansiveness in her chapter on “Short, Micro, and Flash Fiction.” Measured in major prize awards, sales, or downloads, short and short-short fiction have paradoxically thrived during the spatial and temporal conceptual expansions of, for example, globalization and the Anthropocene. Naimou identifies the techniques of short fiction representing planetary stories of migration, climate crisis, and evolutionary history in works by Teju Cole, Edwidge Danticat, Rachel B. Glaser, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and George Saunders.

The Field of Dreams began as the fictional backdrop for a twenty-page short story written by a forty-three-year-old Canadian graduate student studying literature at a midwestern American university. It’s now scheduled to be the actual site of a Major League Baseball game to be played in the 2021 season. What an amazing story! Could W. P. Kinsella really have been such a remarkable visionary to have so clearly foreseen how such a modest prelude would evolve into such a grand finale – all unfolding in the rustling cornfields of Iowa? Readers can decide for themselves. I’ll unspool the spellbinding saga from short story, to novel, to screenplay, to the silver screen, to a tourist venue, and finally to a Major League ballfield. Context, consequence, and coincidence feature prominently in this account.

On November 27, 1933, in San Jose, California, two white men were lynched by an angry mob for allegedly kidnapping and murdering a local celebrity. This chapter traces Steinbeck’s interest in the event and the difficult process of writing about it that would culminate in his short story “The Vigilante” in The Long Valley--a story largely faithful to the historical events but that changes the racial identity of the lynching victims from white to black, and tells the story from a lyncher’s point of view. Drawing on manuscript evidence, on Steinbeck’s developing theory of group psychology (what he called the “phalanx”), and on the history of lynching--and lynching photography--in the United States, the chapter argues that the power of Steinbeck’s short story emerges from its disturbing participation, like a souvenir, in a moment of racist violence. Steinbeck’s problematic play with the short story form is reversed in his story “Johnny Bear,” which employs unreliable narration to undermine the authority of white power by exposing the interracial sexual affairs that lie at its heart.

Steinbeck received much of his early training in creative writing classes at Stanford University. Focusing on Steinbeck’s short story cycle, The Pastures of Heaven, this chapter explores Steinbeck’s education in writing--and his resistance to many of its principles--as it relates to his understanding of the colonial history of the American West. The unstable mixture of realist and fantastic forms, particularly as they relate to the construction of literary character, here encapsulates an ambivalent resonse to the haunting lagacies of slavery and race in the California land. The second part of the chapter, on the story “The Snake,” traces another aspect of Steinbeck’s education--this time in the scientific laboratory--to understand an approach to gender more complex than critics would admit. The experiment with narrative point of view uncovers sexist ideologies in the purportedly objective act of scientific observation, thus bringing attention to the process of attention itself.

This chapter examines the publication of “Theresa” in Freedom’s Journal, a short story about women’s wartime heroism into the broader history of the Haitian Revolution. “Theresa” paints an image of mixed-race womanhood that was not insignificant for both this American venue and for a larger transatlantic context. Like the anonymously written British epistolary novel, The Woman of Colour, A Tale (1808), “Theresa” shows mixed-race women who are aligned with Black racial uplift rather than white assimilation. Moreover, both of these texts present images of mixed-race heroines who differ significantly from those of the “tragic mulatta” genre that would gain popularity during the antebellum period. Instead, “Theresa” frames its mixed-race heroines as models not only of racial solidarity but also of radical abolitionist action. In this, “Theresa” anticipates postbellum mixed-race heroines, through foregoing mixed-race women’s heterosexual union with Black men with their political action alongside them. The chapter offers an analysis of early nineteenth-century texts such as Laura Sansay’s Secret History; or, the Horrors of St. Domingo (1808) and Zelica the Creole (1820), which make the safety of white women the priority of their mixed-race characters.

This chapter surveys novels and short stories that illustrate Americans’ complex response to the First World War from 1914 through the 1930s. Registering conflicting views, ultimately this fiction presents a war that resists easy categorization. Fiction by military veterans, medical professionals, and home-front eyewitnesses is represented – including canonical authors such as Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather, and Katherine Anne Porter; lesser-known writers such as Thomas Boyd, Victor Daly, and Mary Borden whose work has recently been republished; and authors of now out-of-print fiction such as James Stevens, Mary Lee, and Elliot White Springs who deserve greater recognition. A summary of recent literary criticism denotes trends in critical approaches and demonstrates that scholars are re-examining canonical novels and taking an increasing interest in short stories meant for both literary and popular audiences.

The New Woman has a complex relationship with Decadence. For some critics, the Decadent movement is inherently misogynistic. In Daughters of Decadence (1993) Showalter argues that Decadence defines itself ‘against the feminine and biological creativity of women … In decadent writing, women are seen as bound to Nature and the material world because they are more physical than men, more body than spirit, they appear as objects of value only when they are aesthetised as corpses or phallicised as femme fatales’

Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) reached the widening public of his day. He captured the turn to a popular perspective, driving the transformation of Russian culture well into the twentieth century. His inclusive style lent dignity to nearly every character, though he could be ruthlessly ironic. He empathized with his readers and probed new views of identity, otherness, and the nation. In late works he emphasized beauty and the arts as superlative human values. He could engage with popular fiction well because he both read and wrote it. He honed skills that led to innovations in the short story and drama through his reading (and occasional writing) of serialized novels for the boulevard press of the 1880s. He read and corresponded about the best-known serialized bandit story of his day, N. I. Pastukhov’s The Bandit Churkin, which was serialized in The Moscow Sheet from 1882-1885. Chekhov turned the traditional Russian idea of the bandit’s spree or the binge into a deeper inquiry into the positive attributes of freedom. By the time of his death, he had arrived at his own understanding that freedom to create resides in a space coexistent with the world but beyond the encroachment of Church, state, and the market.

In this chapter, it is shown that the textual heterogeneity of the book of Revelation is only on the surface. To the contrary, it has a clear structure, designed to provide unity to the whole: a prologue in which the author provides the guidelines to the reader (1. 1–3); an introductory liturgical dialogue (1. 4–8); an account of the things John saw and heard during his vision (1.9–22.16); and a closing liturgical dialogue (22.17–21). After this, the type of account constituted by Rev 1.9–2.16 is examined, through analysis of previous proposals. We conclude that Rev 1.9–2.16 is a special narrative, with the following characteristics: the use of a homodiegetic narrator (allowing John to simultaneously appear as a witness to the story and as one of its characters, and thus to highlight the veracity of the story he tells); a flexibility in the use of space–time coordinates; the variety of characters that participate in the plot; the fact that the plot has a happy ending; etc. Finally, I explore the author’s purpose of showcasing the truthfulness of the narrative.

Throughout this book, I have disassembled the book of Revelation line by line in search of the principles that underlie its organization. The Epilogue is the moment to reassemble it and verify the model of reading. The result is positive, and it is concluded that the narrative form of Rev 1.9–22.16 is analogous to the short story form as it has developed since the nineteenth century. The principal argument put forward in this book is that one of the singular characteristics of this form is its emphasis on the reader or listener. Revelation also coincides with the short story form in that it features a wide range of characters whose adventures are woven into a plot charged with successive waves of tension and relief that lead eventually to a happy ending. Lastly, there are similarities in the techniques employed: flexibility in the use of space–time coordinates and the intensive use of descriptive adjectives that simultaneously sway the emotions of the reader/listener and provide clues as to the goodness or wickedness of the characters portrayed.