1. The rise of the short story

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Andrew Kahn

‘The rise of the short story’ discusses the rise of the short story from the Industrial Age, which occurred largely in the context of British and American print culture. That development traces a long arc from the establishment of the genre as a staple of 19th-century newspapers and magazines to its autonomy as a mode of literature viewed on the same level as the novel. In the 19th century, the short story catered to the taste of growing readerships for entertainment. Moreover, its brevity and easy supply appealed to editors. Ultimately, the form was shaped critically by the literary marketplace.

Author(s):  
Andrew Kahn

The Short Story: A Very Short Introduction charts the rise of the short story from its original appearance in magazines and newspapers. For much of the 19th century, tales were written for the press, and the form’s history is marked by engagement with popular fiction. The short story then earned a reputation for its skilful use of plot design and character study distinct from the novel. This VSI considers the continuity and variation in key structures and techniques such as the beginning, the creation of voice, the ironic turn or plot twist, and how writers manage endings. Throughout, it draws on examples from an international and flourishing corpus of work.


2018 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-73
Author(s):  
Eldi Grubišić Pulišelić

SummaryThis paper analyses the criticism of the position of women, the existing gender relations and marriage in women’s literature at the end of the 19th century, taking the examples of the novel Plein air (1897) by Croatian author Jagoda Truhelka (1864–1957) and of the short story Wieder die Alte (1886) by Austrian writer Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830–1916). These authors, from the area of the then Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, in spite of different ethnicity, but also of different social status, published stories in the late 19th century where they discussed a similar topic. Both authors are concerned with the issue of women’s work and existence outside or inside civil marriage, but the endings of their works are completely different. While Truhelka’s heroine manages to realize a marriage of love, the heroine of Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach becomes a victim of existing social relationships. Despite the sharp critique of patriarchy and the disruption of the stereotype of a woman as an angel in the home in Plein air, at the end of the novel there is a harmonization of interpersonal relations and the resolution of all existing conflicts, both at a personal and socio-political level. Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach does not show such optimism in Wieder die Alte and her emancipated women are left alone to build their moral integrity into a life without male love. However, we can conclude Truhelka’s, as well as Ebner-Eschenbach’s heroine remain trapped between tradition and emancipation because of, or despite the fact that love shows (no) power in the tyranny of society.


Revue Romane ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 282-293
Author(s):  
Margareth Hagen

The first chapters of Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio were printed in 1881, the same year as the publication of the novel I Malavoglia, Giovanni Verga’s masterpiece of verismo. While every critical reader of Verga’s realism has pointed out his particular narrative interpretation of evolution, Collodi’s has novel very seldom been connected to the theories of evolution, even if Darwin’s ideas were highly present in the public debate in Florence during the last decades of the 19th century. The reasons for this silence are primarily to be found in the genre of Pinocchio, in the fact that it is children literature, and therefore primarily related to the narrative mechanisms of the fairy tales and pedagogical literature. Focusing on Pinocchio, the article discusses to which degree Darwinism can be traced in Collodi’s literature for children, and questions if the continuous metamorphoses of Pinocchio can be read also in connection with the naturalist conception of the literary characters as unstable, in continuous evolution, and not only as part of the mechanisms of fairy tales and mythological narratives.


Author(s):  
Halyna Bokshan

The study examines the features of the strategies of mythologization and mystification used by Yurii Vynnychuk in creating his literary version of Ivan Vahylevych’s biography in the novel “Liutetsiia”. First of all the paper emphasizes the writer’s inclination to play with historic material characteristic of postmodernism, manifesting itself in most of his works and in the novel under study, in particular. The research pays special attention to the original interaction of mythological and cultural-historical aspects in the fictionalized biography of the renowned public figure of the 19th century, famous for his activity in Ruska Triitsia. It considers the specific features of the literary visualization of Ivan Vahylevych character in the relation to Ivan Franko’s essay representing the epistolary of the figures of the historical epoch depicted in the novel. The study determines the correlation between the personages in “Liutetsiia” and the characters and motives of the Celtic mythology. It identifies the specificity of the reminiscent relations of the main character with the archetypal figure of Don Juan. The conclusions highlight the use of irony, grotesque and comic modus by Yurii Vynnychuk as the manifestation of the neo-mythological device of deheroization. It also accentuates that the strategies of mythologization and mystification in “Liutetsiia” reflect the manner of interpreting cultural-historical material characteristic of the author.


2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 91-100
Author(s):  
Anna Kaczmarek-Wiśniewska

Therese Raquin, Zola’s first important work, is based on the modern version of the old physiological theory of “temperaments”, e.g. the combination of four cardinal “humours” that determine a man’s physical and mental constitution. Through the story of two murderers, an adulterous woman and her lover who kill the woman’s husband, the author shows the mutual influence of two temperaments considered in the 19th century as more important than all the others: sanguine and melancholic (or nervous). The novel intends to “verify” a theory dealing with the consequences of each type of temperament for people’s behaviour, their relationships and their internal life.


Author(s):  
Elizabeth Holt

In the mid-19th century, the Arabic novel emerged as a genre in Ottoman Syria and khedival Egypt. While this emergence has often been narrated as a story of the rise of nation-states and the diffusion of the European novel, the genre’s history and ongoing topography cannot be recovered without indexing the importance of Arabic storytelling and Islamic empire, ethics, and aesthetics to its roots. As the Arabic periodicals of Beirut and the Nile Valley, and soon Tunis and Baghdad, serialized and debated the rise of the novel form from the 19th century onward, historical, romantic, and translated novels found an avid readership throughout the Arab world and its diaspora. Metaphors of the garden confronted the maritime span of European empire in the 19th-century rise of the novel form in Arabic, and the novel’s path would continue to oscillate between the local and the global. British, French, Spanish, and Italian empire and direct colonial rule left a lasting imprint on the landscape of the region, and so too the investment of Cold War powers in its pipelines, oil wells, and cultural battlefields. Whether embracing socialist realism or avant-garde experimentation, the Arabic novel serves as an ongoing register of the stories that can be told in cities, villages, and nations throughout the region—from the committed novels interrogating the years of anticolonial national struggles and Arab nationalism in the 1950s and 1960s, through the ongoing history of war, surveillance, exile, occupation, and resource extraction that dictates the subsequent terrain of narration. The Arabic novel bears, too, an indelible mark left by translators of Arabic tales—from 1001 Nights to Girls of Riyadh—on the stories the region’s novelists tell.


Author(s):  
Anne Humpherys

From ancient Greece on, fictional narratives have entailed deciphering mystery. Sophocles’ Oedipus must solve the mystery of the plague decimating Thebes; the play is a dramatization of how he ultimately “detects” the culprit responsible for the plague, who turns out to be Oedipus himself. In the Poetics, Aristotle defines a successful plot as one that has a conflict (which can include, and often does include, a “mystery”) that rises to a climax, followed by a resolution of the conflict, a plot line that describes not only Oedipus Rex but also every Sherlock Holmes story. A particular genre of mystery writing is defined by the mystery at the center of the story that is crucially, definitively solved by a particular person known as a detective, either private or police, who by ratiocination (close observation coupled with logical patterns of thought based on material evidence) uncovers and sorts out the relevant facts essential to a determination of who did the crime and how and why. The form of detective fiction throughout most of the 19th century was the short story published in various periodicals of the period. A few longer detective fictions were published as separate books in the 19th century, but book-length detective fiction, such as that by Agatha Christie, was really a product of the 20th century. Most critics of detective fiction see the beginning of the genre in the three stories of Edgar Allan Poe which feature his amateur detective, Auguste Dupin, and were published in the 1840s. Although Poe’s 1840s stories as well as Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, which first appeared in the 1880s, are probably the most well known of 19th-century detective fictions, a number of other writers of generically recognizable detective fiction published stories in the almost fifty years between Poe and Conan Doyle, including a number that featured female detectives. Finally, from the 1890s into the early 20th century, a plethora of new detective fictions, still in short-story form for the most part, appeared not only in Britain but also in France and the United States. Detective fiction has always been popular, but serious critical interest in the genre only developed in the 20th century. In the second half of that century, this critical interest expanded into the academic world. The popularity of the genre has only continued to grow. Both detective fictions (now nearly all novel length) and critical interest in the genre from a variety of perspectives are now an international phenomenon, and detective novels dominate many best-seller lists.


Author(s):  
Lucille Chia

Print culture in imperial China spans over twelve hundred years, from the late 7th century ce to the end of the Qing Dynasty in 1911. During this long period, mechanical reproduction of texts and image meant primarily woodblock printing (xylography), and, to a lesser extent, typography, using movable types made of wood, metal, and ceramics. Xylography was first used for religious purposes, such as prayer sheets and scriptures, but by the late 8th century, nonreligious imprints for daily use were produced. Only in the mid-10th century, however, did the state and the literati elite begin to produce and disseminate many nonreligious works in print. Thus, the dramatic growth in the number and diversity of imprints produced by government, private, religious, and commercial publishers took off in the Song Dynasty (960–1279), due in great part to the state’s efforts to compile and publish many works. One may argue, however, that not until the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) would print culture be sufficiently widespread to be in ascendance, as evidenced by the great variety of works, the evolving page designs, and the changing attitudes of readers toward imprints. By the mid Qing Dynasty (1644–1911), printing had spread throughout the country into remote regions and throughout all levels of society. Changes in publishing culture from the 19th century onward were spurred by the adoption of new print technologies from the West, such as lithography and movable-type letterpress, which allowed for faster publication of far greater press runs, even as the traditional printing technologies continued to be used. Finally, it is important to note that a thriving manuscript culture continued to coexist with print until at least the late 19th century. The parting of the ways between print and manuscript became lasting only with the dominance of modern print technologies in the 20th century.


2010 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 140-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antenilson Franklyn Rodrigues Lima ◽  
Dante Marcello Claramonte Gallian

This article, the result of a research project presented as a Master's degree dissertation in the graduate program of "Teaching of Health Education" at UNIFESP, seeks to highlight the pertinence of analyzing epilepsy and especially, the paradoxical experience of the epileptic individual through literary narrative. Using as its object the novel, The Idiot, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, it seeks to discuss the relationship between epilepsy and the mystic experience, bearing in mind the context of the scientific and humanistic perspectives of the 19th century and today.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 107-128
Author(s):  
Ștefan Baghiu ◽  
Cosmin Borza

This article conducts a semantic search of The Digital Museum of the Romanian Novel: The 19th Century (MDRR), through which the authors attempt to identify the occurrences of several key concepts for class and labour imagery in the nineteenth-century Romanian novel, such as “muncă” [labour/work], “muncitor” [labourer/worker], “țăran” [peasant], “funcționar” [civil servant], alongside two main words that strikingly point out to a dissemblance of representation of work: “seceră” [sickle] and “pian” [piano]. The authors show that physical work is underrepresented in the Romanian novel between 1844 and 1900, and that novelists prefer to participate to the rise of the novel through representing the bourgeois intimate space.


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