Arrows in Flight

2020 ◽  
pp. 252-268
Author(s):  
Heather Ingman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Aesthetic Value ◽  
Critical Studies ◽  
Sean O'faolain

This chapter explores why the three twentieth-century writers who arguably did most to establish the short story as the quintessential Irish literary form—Frank O’Connor, Seán O’Faoláin, and Mary Lavin—fell short in the novel form. All three writers excelled in the shorter format, devoting meticulous care to their craft and revising and reshaping their stories many times, sometimes even after publication. Furthermore, O’Connor and O’Faoláin wrote influential critical studies of the modern short story, and Lavin was a perceptive arbiter of its aesthetic value and potential. As novelists, however, all three published works that, in the view of critics and also the writers themselves, were failures. The chapter critically examines the reasons that underpin such judgements.

Iraq

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Haytham Bahoora
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Social Realism ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Historical Novels ◽  
The Novel ◽  
War In Iraq ◽  
Critical Social

This chapter examines the development of the novel in Iraq. It first considers the beginnings of prose narrative in Iraq, using the intermingling of the short story and the novel, particularly in the first half of the twentieth century, as a framework for reassessing the formal qualities of the Arabic novel. It then turns to romantic and historical novels published in the 1920s, as well as novels dealing with social issues like poverty and the condition of peasants in the countryside. It discusses the narrative emergence of the bourgeois intellectual’s self-awareness and interiority in Iraqi fiction, especially the novella; works that continued the expression of a critical social realism in the Iraqi novelistic tradition and the appearance of modernist aesthetics; and narratives that addressed dictatorship and war in Iraq. The chapter concludes with an overview of the novel genre in Iraq after 2003.

Jovita Gonzalez Stakes a Claim in Tejas History

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen R. Roybal
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Race Relations ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
Master's Thesis ◽  
Mexico Border ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries

This chapter examines the short story, "Shades of the Tenth Muses," the novel, Caballero: A Historical Novel, and a master's thesis – each narrative written by Tejana folklorist and author, Jovita González – to reveal how she contributed to an alternative archive about the Texas/Mexico borderlands. As a member of the Texas folklore society, González participated alongside what were considered prominent Texas folklorists and historians (mainly Anglo males) of the twentieth century, in an effort to (re)tell her own version of Tejano history. The chapter argues that González uses her literary and academic work to create an alternative archive about gender and race relations along the Texas/Mexico border in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her work contributes to an ever-growing body of Chicana/o work that recuperates Mexicana/o cultural memory.

The Short Story, the New Weird, and the Literary Market

2020 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-128
Author(s):  
Raphael Zähringer
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Academic Work ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
The State ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Main Argument ◽  
Weird Fiction ◽  
Literary Market

Abstract The short story is commonly – and very productively – treated in the spirit of critical terms such as marginality and liminality. Quite surprisingly, though, New Weird Fiction, which postulates similar interests in, e.g., formal and aesthetic innovation as well as literary ambition, is primarily associated with the novel. The underlying lack of interest in the New Weird Short Story in both popular culture and academic work is scrutinised in this article. In a first step, it will survey the short story as a liminal form, both formally and aesthetically, and contextualize it by drawing upon the state of the literary market in the twenty-first century. The contribution’s main argument is that the short story has always either been considered to be too ‘popular’ or too ‘literary’ in order to contest the novel as the prevalent literary form. Step two will perform a similar move regarding Weird Fiction, thus highlighting the parallels between the short and the Weird, and the need for more academic attention dedicated to the New Weird short story.

Re-enter Jessie, 1911–1912

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Sexual Partner ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Continue Work ◽  
Seriously Ill

Jessie’s criticism was crucial to Paul Morel’s transformation into one of the great novels of the twentieth century. She advised Lawrence to stay much closer to actuality, and in particular to include the death of his elder brother Ernest (William in the novel) which had been omitted from the second draft. This plot element is subtle, poignant and thematically resonant, since William's death is imbricated with his inability to choose a suitable sexual partner and by extension with his relationship to his mother. Jessie showed acute critical judgement about the potential of the biographical material and the appropriate style for tackling it. She also had a more personal motive: she hoped that by writing this story 'Lawrence might free himself from his strange obsession with his mother.’ Lawrence agreed to her plan and asked her to write some reminiscences of their times together. But he had barely begun rewriting the novel before he fell seriously ill with pneumonia. He did not continue work on the novel while ill, but he did write a short story, the first version of 'The Shades of Spring', in which he re-imagined his relationship with Jessie.

The singular effect of brevity: Why Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Fly’ could not have been a novel

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-159 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Feklistova
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Edgar Allan Poe ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Symbolic Meaning ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
Emotional Effect ◽  
The Relationship

It is noteworthy that critics who come to very different conclusions about the symbolic meaning of Katherine Mansfield’s 1922 short story ‘The Fly’ respond to the text in much the same way emotionally. In examining why exactly ‘The Fly’ is so disturbing, this article interrogates the relationship between feeling and literary form, arguing that the emotional effect of any work of prose fiction is decisively influenced by narrative length. Drawing upon the ideas of Edgar Allan Poe and Frank O’Connor, the article examines how the effect of elaborate description differs from the effect of summary and deliberate omission. Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Fly’ typifies how, due to its brevity, the short story as a literary form can present one single, minor incident as major, to great emotional effect and without recourse to symbolism, which is something that the longer prose form of the novel cannot do.

scholarly journals José María Merino: teoría y práctica del microrrelato

Monteagudo ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 17-35
Author(s):  
Ángel Basanta
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
The Third ◽  
Narrative Mode ◽  
Siglo Xx ◽  
Sobre Todo

El microrrelato ha alcanzado un extraordinario auge en las últimas décadas. Se define por su acusada brevedad y su intensa narratividad, su extrema concentración y economía expresiva sustentadas en la elipsis y el arte de sugerir. Aunque ha habido microrrelatos desde las primeras manifestaciones de la literatura, este cuarto género narrativo nace como tal a partir del Romanticismo y, sobre todo, en el modernismo, alcanza su pleno desarrollo a lo largo del siglo XX, a partir de J. R. Jiménez y R. Gómez de la serna, en españa, y, más aún, en Hispanoamérica, con maestros como Borges, A. monterroso y J. Cortázar; y se consolida como el cuarto género narrativo a finales del XX y comienzos del XXI. José Mª merino es uno de los escritores españoles que más y mejor ha contribuido a la construcción de la teoría del microrrelato y está considerado como uno de los maestros indiscutibles en la creación de minificciones representativas de esta modalidad narrativa. Reunió sus microrrelatos por primera vez en La glorieta de los fugitivos. Minificción completa (2007). A ellos hay que añadir los intercalados después entre los cuentos de El libro de las horas contadas (2011) y los agrupados en la tercera parte de La trama oculta (cuentos de los dos lados con una silva mínima) (2014). The short short-story is flourishing in recent decades. It is defined by its acute brevity and its intense narrativity, its concentrated form and expressive economy underpinned by its elliptical and suggestive nature. Although there have been instances of short short-stories since the beginnings of the literary form, this narrative genre begins to take shapre in the Romantic and modernist periods, and develops fully in the twentieth century, in the writings of J. R. Jiménez and R. Gómez de la serna in spain and, in latin America, in those of Borges, A. monterroso y J. Cortázar. It becomes consolidated as the fourth narrative genre at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries. José María Merino is one of the spanish writers who has done most to contribute to the development of the theory of the short short-story and is widely considered one of the best creators of the mini-fictions representative of this narrative mode. His first collection of short short-stories is La glorieta de los fugitivos. Minificción completa (2007), to which he has since added others to be found amongst the short stories of El libro de las horas contadas (2011) and those grouped in the third part of La trama oculta (cuentos de los dos lados con una silva mínima) (2014).

Coda: The Rosetta Stone

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Schotter
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Digital Code ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Rosetta Stone ◽  
The World ◽  
Western Imagination ◽  
Origin Point

Hieroglyphs have persisted for so long in the Western imagination because of the malleability of their metaphorical meanings. Emblems of readability and unreadability, universality and difference, writing and film, writing and digital media, hieroglyphs serve to encompass many of the central tensions in understandings of race, nation, language and media in the twentieth century. For Pound and Lindsay, they served as inspirations for a more direct and universal form of writing; for Woolf, as a way of treating the new medium of film and our perceptions of the world as a kind of language. For Conrad and Welles, they embodied the hybridity of writing or the images of film; for al-Hakim and Mahfouz, the persistence of links between ancient Pharaonic civilisation and a newly independent Egypt. For Joyce, hieroglyphs symbolised the origin point for the world’s cultures and nations; for Pynchon, the connection between digital code and the novel. In their modernist interpretations and applications, hieroglyphs bring together writing and new media technologies, language and the material world, and all the nations and languages of the globe....

Crumbling into Dust

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Levi Barnard
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Richard Wright ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Unfinished Business ◽  
Black Newspapers ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Antebellum Period ◽  
David Walker ◽  
Historical Times

This chapter situates Chesnutt’s writing within a tradition of black classicism as political engagement and historical critique extending from the antebellum period to the twentieth century and beyond. Reading Chesnutt as a figure at the crossroads of multiple historical times and cultural forms, the chapter examines his manipulation of multiple mythic traditions into a cohesive and unsettling vision of history as unfinished business. In the novel The Marrow of Tradition and the late short story “The Marked Tree,” Chesnutt echoes a nineteenth-century tradition that included David Walker, Henry Highland Garnet, and writers and editors for antebellum black newspapers, while at the same time anticipating a later anti-imperial discourse generated by writers such as Richard Wright and Toni Morrison. Chesnutt provides a fulcrum for a collective African American literary history that has emerged as a prophetic counterpoint to the prevailing historical consciousness in America.

Materializing Ulysses

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Forster
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Film Adaptation ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Perceived Power

This chapter compares the reception of Joyce’s 1922 Ulysses with that of Joseph Strick’s 1967 film adaptation of the novel. Although Ulysses had been legally publishable in England for decades, Strick’s film still encountered censorship from the British Board of Film Censors. The chapter argues that Joyce’s novel, for all its obscenity and provocation, mitigated its threat by foregrounding its own printedness, allying its fate to the waning power of print as a bearer of obscenity. Strick’s film, by contrast, activated the perceived power of film. The contrast of the two versions of Ulysses, which are often identical in language, thus offers a valuable window on how obscenity changed across media through the twentieth century. In making this argument, the chapter surveys print strategies of censorship, including the asterisk, and how these strategies operated in a range of works.

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