Twentieth-Century Short Story Explication: Interpretations 1900-1975, of Short Fiction since 1800

1978 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 29
Author(s):  
William B. Warde ◽  
Warren S. Walker
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Short Fiction

From Newspaperman to Short Story Writer

Irvin S. Cobb ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
William E. Ellis
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Short Fiction ◽  
Small Town ◽  
White Americans ◽  
Big City ◽  
Story Writer ◽  
Attention To Detail

Ellis begins by describing Cobb’s successful ventures as a humorist and how his appearance played into his style. His attention to detail and offbeat subjects became a staple for Evening World readers. Cobb used his small-town Kentucky perspective to make observations about the big city in his first long-running humor series, “New York thro’ Funny Glasses.” The transplanted Kentuckian exemplified the racial attitudes of many white Americans in the early twentieth century. Eventually, Cobb’s writing found a place in the Sunday World Magazine. Cobb also tried his hand at writing short fiction. Over the next three decades, Cobb turned out an immense amount of copy for newspapers and magazines, wrote short stories and plays, dabbled in movies, and wrote novels. He never seemed to be short of ideas.

scholarly journals Recovering a “Lost Europe”: The De-Centering of Master Narratives in Eyvind Johnson’s Natten är här

Humanities ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 46
Author(s):  
Elliott J. Brandsma
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Short Fiction ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Historical Novels ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Master Narratives ◽  
Short Story Collection ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
The Face

A socially-engaged literary Modernist, whose writings possess an incisive skepticism toward political power, Eyvind Johnson (1900–1976) was a working-class autodidact who became a prominent voice in Swedish letters during the twentieth century. His historical novels have attracted the most critical attention to date, but his short fiction from the 1920s reveals a young author increasingly suspicious of what postmodern theorist Jean-Francois Lyotard would later call master narratives—totalizing views of historical events that serve a political or universalized function. In “Kort Besök” (A Short Visit), “Det Förlorade Europa,” (The Lost Europe) and “En Man i Etolien” (A Man in Aetolia), from his 1932 short story collection Natten är här (The Night Has Come), Johnson’s characters resist and subvert various master narratives, maintaining their dignity and individuality in the face of destructive political, military or nationalistic agendas. Although his formal experimentation, introspective storytelling and narrative irresolution firmly situate him in the Modernist literary tradition, Johnson’s disruption of grand narratives about historical events in these stories previews postmodernity, with its radical interrogation of language’s subjugating power, suggesting a new avenue for evaluating and apprehending his literary innovations. Short fiction, thus, offers an accessible entryway into the complex art of Eyvind Johnson, whose intricate novels about centuries past have long resisted casual readership.

scholarly journals What “A Smile of Fortune” Has To Hide: An Intertextual And Comparative Reconsideration of the Texture and Theme of Conrad’s Tale

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 7-33
Author(s):  
Grażyna Maria Teresa Branny
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Short Fiction ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Light In August ◽  
Moby Dick ◽  
Textual Evidence ◽  
Point Of Reference

The present article is part of a larger project on Conrad’s less known short fiction, the area of his writing which is largely undervalued, and even deprecated at times. The paper’s aim is to enhance the appreciation of “A Smile of Fortune,” by drawing attention to its “inner texture” as representative of Conrad’s “art of expression,” especially in view of the writer’s own belief in the supremacy of form over content as well as “suggestiveness” over “explicitness” in his fiction. To achieve this aim a New Critical (“close reading”), intertextual and comparative approaches to Conrad’s story have been adopted, involving nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literary texts, i.e., both those preceding and those following the publication of Conrad’s ’Twixt Land and Sea (1912) volume featuring the tale in question. The intertextual reading of “A Smile of Fortune” against Bernard Malamud’s short story “The Magic Barrel,” Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, and William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, with Light in August as a point of reference, reveals the workings in Conrad’s story of the modernist device of denegation, which, alongside antithesis and oxymoron, seems to be largely responsible for the tale’s contradictions and ambiguities, which should thus be perceived as the story’s asset rather than flaw. The textual evidence of Conrad’s tale, as well as its comparison with three short stories: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and Peter Taylor’s “Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time,” seem to confirm the presence of the implications of the theme of incest in Conrad’s text, heretofore unrecognized in criticism. Overall, the foregoing analysis of “A Smile of Fortune” hopes to account for, if not disentangle, the story’s complex narratological meanderings and seemingly insoluble ambiguities, particularly as regards character and motive, naming Conrad rather than Faulkner the precursor of denegation.

scholarly journals Hayduk novels in the nineteenth-century Romanian fiction: notes on a sub-genre

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roxana Patraș
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Short Fiction ◽  
Social Classes ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Luxury Goods ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Romanian Literature

In the context of nineteenth and early twentieth-century Romanian literature, hajduk novels and hajduk short fiction (novella, short-story, tale) are called to bring back  a lost “epicness,” to give back the hajduks their lost aura. But why did the Romanian readers need this remix? Was it for ideological reasons? Did the growing female readership influence the  affluence of hajduk fiction? Could the hajduk novels have supplied the default of other important fiction sub-genres such as children or teenage literature? The present article supports the idea that, as a distinct fiction sub-genre, the hajduk novels convey a modern lifestyle, attached to new values such as the disengagement from material objects, the democratization of access to luxury goods and commodities, and the mobility of social classes. Clothing, leisure, eating/ drinking/ sleeping/ hygiene, work, military and forest/ nomad life, and ritual items that are mentioned in these novels can help us correlate the technical tendencies reflected in the making of objects to a particular ethnicity (Romanian).

scholarly journals “Uprooted:” Anton Chekhov’s Influence on Frank O’Connor

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 98-109
Author(s):  
Márta Pellérdi
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Short Fiction ◽  
The Other ◽  
Anton Chekhov ◽  
Russian Author ◽  
Narrative Techniques ◽  
The One ◽  
Lasting Influence ◽  
Crab Apple

Abstract Thus far perhaps the most acclaimed Irish practitioner of the short story, Frank O’Connor, attributes a lasting influence to Russian author Anton Chekhov when he considers the direction that the modern Irish short story was to take in the twentieth century. In The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story (1963), O’Connor emphasized two particular themes in Chekhov’s short fiction that influenced his own stories: on the one hand, a preoccupation with loneliness; on the other, a belief that venial sin, or the adoption of a false personality, was “far more destructive” than mortal sin itself. In other writings, he expressed an interest in narrative technique and structure as he found them in Chekhov’s stories. The article explores O’Connor’s “Uprooted” from his collection Crab Apple Jelly (1944), a story about displaced intellectuals. My reading illustrates how the Irish writer was not only adopting Chekhov’s themes but was also experimenting with Chekhov’s character types and narrative techniques, particularly as found in the Russian author’s story “The Lady with the Dog.” At the same time, O’Connor developed a distinctly individual technique of his own within the Irish realist/naturalist short story tradition, making a lasting impact on the art of the modern Irish short story. Unlike his displaced Irish characters in “Uprooted,” he prefers to remain faithful to this tradition.

The Yellow Wall-Paper and Other Stories

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Fiction ◽  
Social Problems ◽  
Charlotte Perkins Gilman ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Selection Of

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was America's leading feminist intellectual of the early twentieth century. The Yellow Wall-Paper and Other Stories makes available the fullest selection of her short fiction ever printed. In addition to her pioneering masterpiece, ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’ (1890), which draws on her own experience of depression and insanity, this edition features her Impress ‘story studies’, works in the manner of writers such as James, Twain, and Kipling. These stories, together with other fiction from her neglected California period (1890-5), throw new light on Gilman as a practitioner of the art of fiction. In her Forerunner stories she repeatedly explores the situation of ‘the woman of fifty’ and inspires reform by imagining workable solutions to a range of personal and social problems.

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.

scholarly journals RIAK-RIAK POSMODERN DALAM CERPEN ABRACADABRA KARYA DANARTO

2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 18
Author(s):  
Dudy Syafruddin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Social Phenomenon ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Historiographic Metafiction ◽  
The Social ◽  
The 1960S

Literature is a product of culture keeping abreast of human mind. Literary works is a means for the authors to express the social phenomenon in his life. The discourses about postmodernism in the second half of twentieth century, as a part of the story of human mind, was a profound interest for the Authors. In Indonesia, the postmodern discourse has come up in the 1960s. This paper involves the elements of Postmodernism in the short story “Abacadabra” written by Danarto. The dominant elements in this short story are parody, fragmentary, and historiographic metafiction.

scholarly journals Condemnation of Religious Concepts: An Examination of Chubak's "An Afternoon in Late Autumn" through Bakhtin's Theory of Grotesque Realism

2018 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-67
Author(s):  
Sayed Mohammad Anoosheh ◽  
Muhammad Hussein Oroskhan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Lower Section ◽  
Persian Literature ◽  
Social Hierarchies ◽  
Late Autumn ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Style Of Writing ◽  
A Site

The first traces of modernism in Iranian society can be found in the second decade of twentieth century which was deeply embedded with religious concepts. With regard to Persian literature, short story was developed as a new genre and a sign of modernism of that period by prominent Iranian writers such as Sadeq Hedayat (1903-1951), Mohammad Ali Jamalzadeh (1892-1997) and Sadegh Chubak (1916-1998). In this way a cultural clash was broken out between the traditional religious concepts and the new modern ideas. Among these writers, Chubak was more influenced by the doctrine of modernism. He expressed his message colloquially through his short stories to instigate the lower part of society. His naturalistic style of writing delved into the most gruesome details of people's life with the aim of shocking his reader in experiencing a new perspective previously ignored. To highlight Chubak's style of writing attempt is made to explore one of the highly praised short stories entitled "An Afternoon in Late Autumn" on the ground of the Bakhtin's theory of grotesque realism cited in Rabelais and His World. Grotesque realism is a site upon which religious and social hierarchies can be subverted and renewed. This study tries to reveal that Chubak followed the Bakhtin's grotesque realism to evoke a new outlook particularly in the lower section of society.

The Stone Dreams scandal: the Nagorny Karabakh conflict and Armenian-Azerbaijani relations in contemporary literature

2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 42-59
Author(s):  
Mikail Mamedov
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Contemporary Literature ◽  
Traumatic Events ◽  
Democratic Institutions ◽  
Recent Past ◽  
Ruling Elite ◽  
Home Village ◽  
Conflict Reconciliation ◽  
Armenian Population

This article analyses the scandal that broke out in Azerbaijan after the publication of Stone Dreams, a novel by Azerbaijani writer Akram Aylisli. Stone Dreams depicted and condemned the persecution against the Armenian population in Baku and Sumgait in 1988-1990, as well as the early twentieth century massacre of the Armenian community in the writer’s home village, Aylis in Nakhichevan. Akram Aylisli touched on a taboo and in a context with weak civic and democratic institutions, the discussion of such traumatic events in Azerbaijan’s recent past proved unacceptable to both society and the ruling elite. This article reaches beyond contemporary debates, however, to cover earlier and less well-known works with Armenian-Azerbaijani themes such as Evgeniy Voyskunskiy’s novel Maiden Dreams, Seymur Baycan’s Gugark, Maria Martirosova’s Photos To Remember Me By and Levon Javakhian’s short story “Kirve”. These works are reviewed here in terms of how they address issues of conflict, reconciliation and responsibility. This article underscores the importance of literary works dealing with conflict, as they usually reach a much broader audience than academic books.

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