The Nineteenth-Century American Short Story: Language, Form and Ideology.

1994 ◽  
Vol 66 (4) ◽  
pp. 840
Author(s):  
Dennis W. Eddings ◽  
Douglas Tallack
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Language Form

A double dose of death in Iginio Ugo Tarchetti’s ‘I fatali’

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christina Petraglia
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Double Dose ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Father And Son ◽  
Otto Rank

This chapter posits a psychoanalytic reading of Iginio Ugo Tarchetti’s short story ‘I fatali’ (‘The Fated Ones’) published posthumously in the collection Racconti fantastici (Fantastic Tales) (1869). It focuses on the mortal rivalry between the father and son figures, Count Sagrezwitch and Baron Saternez, who become known in late nineteenth-century Milanese society of the short story as true embodiments of fatal beings belonging to popular superstition, known as jinxes – bringers of bad fortune, illness, harm, and even death to others. Drawing from Otto Rank and Sigmund Freud’s conceptions of the Doppelgänger, it is argued that these protagonists emerge as complementary doubles for one another, as opposing incarnations of Death in the form of mysterious foreigners. This chapter also highlights the post-Unification, socio-cultural undertones of Tarchetti’s fantastic tale, affirms the existence of an Italian Gothic, and reveals the author’s portrayal of death’s spectacular nature.

{ Epilogue }

2021 ◽  
pp. 211-220
Author(s):  
John Evelev
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
The West ◽  
Regional Dialects ◽  
Reconstruction Era ◽  
Entire Nation ◽  
William Cullen ◽  
Fictional Story

The discourse of the picturesque reshaped how Americans understood their landscape, but it largely ended in the mid-1870s. The decline of the picturesque can be illustrated in two emblematic works: Constance Fenimore Woolson’s 1872 short story “In Search of the Picturesque” and William Cullen Bryant’s enormous 1874 scenery book Picturesque America. Woolson’s fictional story is a satire of travel in which a young urban woman accompanies her grandfather to the countryside “in search of the picturesque” and instead only finds development. This story signals the shift in literary interest in rural subjects toward regionalism. Regionalism disavowed the earlier focus on picturesque landscapes, instead featuring distinctive regional dialects and cultural practices that reflected the newly created social sciences. Bryant’s Picturesque America was a Reconstruction-era project aimed at reconnecting the divided nation through a nonhierarchical unification under the sign of “picturesque.” Adding not only the West but also the South to the compendium of American scenery, Picturesque America imagined the entire nation as picturesque. In this formulation, the picturesque became synonymous with landscape in general. Although the picturesque lost its appeal as an authoritative discourse for shaping the American landscape in the latter third of the nineteenth century, this book demonstrates that the spaces that dominated American life in the twentieth century and beyond are owed almost entirely to the transformative project of the mid-nineteenth-century picturesque.

The Adventure of the Stradivarius: Violins in the Work of Arthur Conan Doyle and William Crawford Honeyman

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachael Durkin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Detective Story ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Arthur Conan Doyle

Abstract The violin, despite its fleeting appearances in the stories of Sherlock Holmes, has become prominently associated with the character of Sherlock in modern TV and film adaptions. While the violin is never investigated by Holmes in the stories, it is represented in more depth in a precursory detective story by William Crawford Honeyman: a Scottish author-musician, whose work appears to have influenced Arthur Conan Doyle’s tales of Sherlock Holmes. Honeyman’s short story ‘The Romance of a Real Cremona’ (1884) follows detective James McGovan as he traces and returns a stolen Stradivari violin and unravels its complex provenance. The importance of the violin’s inclusion in fictional works has been little discussed in scholarship. Here, the texts of Doyle and Honeyman serve as a lens through which to analyse the meaning of the violin during the Victorian era. By analysing the violin from an organological perspective, this article examines the violin’s prominence in nineteenth-century British domestic music-making, both as a fiscally and culturally valuable object. The final section of the article explores the meaning attached to, and created by, the violin in the stories of Doyle and Honeyman.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Elke D’hoker ◽  
Chris Mourant
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Short Fiction ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Periodical Studies ◽  
The Status ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Material Turn ◽  
And Function ◽  
The Impact

This chapter provides an overview of the methodological and historical frames that inform the book’s analysis of the manifold interactions between the short story and British magazine culture, from 1880 to 1950. It discusses the material turn in short fiction studies which has led to a better understanding of the impact of publication contexts on the production, reception and development of the short story. This holds true in particular for the role magazines played in the emergence of the modern short story as a specific and successful literary form in the final decades of the nineteenth century. The chapter also presents an overview of recent developments in periodical studies, providing useful methodological tools for analysing the status, presentation and function of a particular genre within the heterogeneous, dialogic and time-bound format of the periodical.

The Significance of the Short Story in Indian English Literature

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Y. L. Marreddy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Short Story ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Human Spirit ◽  
Indian English ◽  
Self Discovery ◽  
The Voice

The beginnings of the Indian short story in English were made under the influence of the Britishers. English Short Story began towards the close of the nineteenth Century in India. It is the distinct from the fables of the ‘Hitopadesh’ and the tales of Panchatantra’. The short Story has become the major expression of literature in India which is used as a weapon to rise the voice of Indians against the Britishers culturally and Politically. The Fragmentation of experience as a result of the increasing complexity of social changes, seems to make the short story an apt vehicle for exploring the dark places of the human spirit and disembodied states of being. It is a voyage of discovery of self-discovery, of self – realisation for the character.

"Who's Afraid of Arthur Schopenhauer?": A New Context for Conrad's Heart of Darkness

1994 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Owen Knowles
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Critical Issue ◽  
Arthur Schopenhauer ◽  
Contextual Influences ◽  
Anxiety Of Influence ◽  
Heart Of Darkness ◽  
German Philosopher ◽  
Historically Situated ◽  
Dead Man

Conrad's relationship to Schopenhauer and the nineteenth-century traditions of pessimism sponsored by the German philosopher has long been a contentious critical issue. This paper discovers a new shaping context for Kurtz, the Promethean outlaw-philosopher and ubiquitous "voice" of Heart of Darkness, not in Schopenhauer's own writings but in the secondary myths, legends, and icons that endowed the great philosopher with a potent cultural afterlife during the period from 1870 to 1900. The numerous consonances between this body of later Schopenhauriana and Heart of Darkness point to ways in which powerful fin du globe anxieties and dark ancestral obsessions covertly inform both the tale's construction of Kurtz and its narrative practices-notably, its fashioning of a mythical narrative drawing upon established parallels between Schopenhauer and a monistic heart of darkness, its preoccupation with the problems of hearing and transmitting a ubiquitous legacy, and its climactic issue in the experiences of a disciple haunted by the spectral ghost of a dead ancestor. When placed against three varied examples from the period's Schopenhaueriana-Maupassant's short story "Beside a Dead Man" (1883), William Wallace's biography of the philosopher (1890), and Nietzsche's celebratory "Schopenhauer as Educator" from his Thoughts Out of Season (1874)-Heart of Darkness emerges as a work embroiled in an anxiety of influence whose invasive voices are both welcomed and resisted: its welcome most evident in cryptographic play with elements of the Schopenhauer legend, its resistance most marked in the skeptical rewriting of the celebratory mode employed by Nietzsche to welcome the heroic educator. A final coda views the tale's rhetorical excesses in the light of these contextual influences and suggests ways in which the substantially "Schopenhauerian world" of the story bears upon its concerns as a historically situated colonial fiction.

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