scholarly journals Significance of Short Story Cycle in Rachel Joyce’s A Snow Garden and Other Stories: An Analytical Study Using Complexity Theory

2022 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Complex Systems ◽  
Complexity Theory ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Urban Setting ◽  
Centralized Control ◽  
Short Story Cycle ◽  
Short Story Collection ◽  
Evolving Networks ◽  
Story Cycle ◽  
Narrative Techniques

Rachel Joyce’s short story collection A Snow Garden and Other Stories (2015) is composed of seven stories which occur during a fortnight of the holiday, Christmas season. The collection uses narrative techniques which make it a unique set of stories. The stories have an urban setting and examine the intricacies of human relationships. The sense of interconnection highlighted by Joyce in the stories elevates it to a short story cycle. A short story cycle consists of individual stories which can stand on their own as complete narratives while also maintaining fictional links running through all the stories. The paper is an attempt to establish A Snow Garden and Other Stories as a short story cycle. It also argues that by narrating the interconnected nature of human lives Joyce’s work is exploring life as a complex system. As a scientific philosophy complexity theory explores the behavior of complex systems including human societies. Complex systems are self-organizing, dynamic, evolving networks that operate without any centralized control, similar to human societies. This paper will apply the principles of complex systems to reveal patterns of human behavior represented in Joyce’s work.

Forming Provisional Identities

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer J. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Contemporary Fiction ◽  
Short Story Cycle ◽  
Literary Responses ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Story Cycle ◽  
Narrative Techniques

The introduction argues that the short story cycle is the preeminent genre for articulating the uncertainty that characterizes literary responses to modernity. The introduction outlines two vital contributions of the cycle to American literary history: 1. the absence of textual harmony in the cycle initiated new, pervasive narrative techniques of proliferating perspectives and disrupting chronology that inflect modern and contemporary fiction and 2. the form of the cycle enables the expression of subjectivity without fixity. Contingency and multiplicity are so central to our social-media infused culture that provisionality is its defining characteristic, but this book shows that the seeds for this go back almost to the nation’s founding.

scholarly journals Across community barriers: female characters in Vimala Devi’s short stories

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. e45888
Author(s):  
Cielo Griselda Festino
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Women Characters ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Main Argument ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Short Story Cycle ◽  
Short Story Collection ◽  
Story Cycle ◽  
Story Collection

This article brings a reading of the short-story collection Monção [Monsoon] ( 2003) by the Goan writer Vimala Devi (1932-). The collection can be read as a short-story cycle, a group of stories related by locality, Goa, character, Goans, from all walks of life, and theme, in particular women´s milieu, among other literary categories. In her book, written from her self-imposed exile in Portugal, Devi recreates Goa, former Portuguese colony, in the 1950s, before its annexation to India. A member of the Catholic gentry, Devi portrays the four hundred years of conflictive intimacy between Catholics and Hindus. Our main argument is that Devi´s empathy for her culture becomes even more explicit in Monção when her voice becomes one with that of all her women characters. Though they might be at odds, due to differences of caste, class and religion, Devi makes a point of showing that they are all part of the same cultural identity constantly remade through their own acts of refusal and recognition. This discussion will be framed in terms of Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s theory of autobiography (2001) as well as the studies on Goan women by the Goan critics Propércia Correia Afonso (1928-1931), Maria Aurora Couto (2005) and Fátima da Silva Gracias (2007).

scholarly journals THE SHORT STORY CYCLE IN CONTEMPORARY BRITISH LITERATURE (BASED ON THE SHORT STORIES BY J. MCGREGOR)

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 628-634
Author(s):  
G.I. Lushnikova ◽  
T.Yu. Osadchaya
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
British Literature ◽  
Narrative Fiction ◽  
Short Story Cycle ◽  
Contemporary British Literature ◽  
Story Cycle ◽  
Classical Traditions ◽  
Narrative Techniques ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Short Narrative

The article is devoted to the poetics of the short story cycle - a genre of short narrative fiction, where classical traditions and experimental narrative techniques are used to explicate topical issues of contemporary British literature. Beside the fact that the stories are relatively short, they are characterized by semantic compression, gaps in meaning, “internal” psychological plot, intensity, expressive imagery, lyricism, implications. The consistency of the short story cycle is created by thematic complementarity, coherence of style and composition. The short story cycle by J. McGregor ‘That Isn’t the Sort of Thing that Happens to Someone like You’ is devoted to everyday life of English Fenland inhabitants and can be attributed to the ‘narrative of community’ genre, traditional for British literature. McGregor’s short story cycle embodies almost all modern tendencies of the genre: a wide palette of themes within the framework of topical issues; vivid psychological portraits and images; variety of narrative types and forms; suggestiveness, implications, specific usage of pronouns, stylistic devices of contrast and repetition.

Novellas-in-Flash and Flash Cycles

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer J. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Contemporary Fiction ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Short Story Cycle ◽  
Short Story Collection ◽  
Aesthetic Practice ◽  
History Of ◽  
Social And Ethical Issues ◽  
Story Cycle

The coda places the book in a larger discourse about new formalisms, which see form as a way to understand political, social, and ethical issues as intrinsic to aesthetic practice. The coda offers a theory of how the short story cycle inverts, displaces, and combines elements of the short story, the short story collection, the novel, and ancient story cycles. The long history of the cycle suggests a unique generic compulsion—which unsettles expectations of closure, development, revelation, and explanation—that revolutionized modern and contemporary fiction.

Resisting Identity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer J. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Short Story Cycle ◽  
Racial Identities ◽  
Story Cycle

Chapter five argues that the best way to grasp William Faulkner’s oeuvre is through the paradigm of the short story cycle because of his use of limited localities, interstitial temporalities, and formative kinships; this approach pushes against a mountain of criticism that expects and measures the unity of his work. The form, with its privileging of multiple, competing narratives, is ideally suited to articulating the crises of history and subjectivity that Faulkner dramatizes. Faulkner’s achievements in the cycle reach an apex in Go Down, Moses (1942), which is his most sustained treatment of black-white relations. Go Down, Moses explores both continual and heightened moments of interracial intimacies. The stories most sharply narrate the crises that the white McCaslin line faces when grappling with their unacknowledged kinship with the black Beauchamp line. This chapter demonstrate that the cycle dramatizes the production of provisional racial identities, because they do not depend upon rigid distinctions, essential characteristics, or defined origins.

Book Reviews

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-169
Author(s):  
Robert M. Luscher ◽  
Felicity Skelton ◽  
Sarah Whitehead
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Short Story Cycle ◽  
Story Cycle

The American Short Story Cycle, Jennifer J. Smith (2018)Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 194 pp.,ISBN 978-1-47442-393-9, h/bk, £75.00ISBN 978-1-47445-269-4, p/bk, £19.99Dead Voices, F. G. Paci (2019)Toronto: Guernica Editions, 285 pp.,ISBN 978-1-77183-319-6 (EPUB), ISBN 978-1-77183-318-9, p/bk, $25Eye, Marianne Micros (2018)Toronto: Guernica Editions, 142 pp.,ISBN 978-1-77183-258-8 (EPUB), ISBN 978-1-77183-257-1, p/bk, $20Katherine Mansfield and Periodical Culture, Chris Mourant (2019)Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 301 pp.,ISBN 978-1-47443-945-9, h/bk, £80

Women’s relational autonomy and the short story cycle: Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helena Kadmos
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Personal Growth ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Relational Autonomy ◽  
Short Story Cycle ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
Shared Beliefs ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
Story Cycle ◽  
The Individual

Focussing on Elizabeth Strout’s short story cycle, Olive Kitteridge (2008), this article proposes that contemporary collections of interconnected stories open new ways of understanding women’s relational autonomy, and the importance of continuing relationships of interdependence and care. Here, relational autonomy is seen as a framework for shared beliefs that subjects’ situated identities are formed within the context of social relationships and shaped by a complex intersection of social determinants, such as race, class, gender and ethnicity. This discussion proposes that the short story cycle is a particularly productive form for writers interested in exploring how women come to a greater sense of who they are through these relationships – some enduring, others not – as they are experienced through apparently mundane moments in women’s lives. This is partly due to less emphasis on the individual trajectory of an autonomous person, and a greater focus on the shared experiences that shape identities and foster personal growth and collective fulfilment. The article seeks to explore this understanding of the cycle by reflecting on distinctive features of the form – modular narrative structure and narrative openness – seen in Olive Kitteridge, to demonstrate how this mode of storytelling helps make salient women’s relational lives.

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