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This piece was the first to discuss the relation of a new papyrus to Ovid's Metamorphoses. The papyrus exhibits a sequence of unjoined elegiac accounts of metamorphoses; the individual accounts are shown to have been relatively short. The work is argued to be probably Hellenistic, and possibly by Parthenius. It throws light on the typology of Hellenistic poetry, much of which presents formally linked or formally unlinked sequences of parallel items. The work brings out for us, and possibly Ovid's first readers, the sweep and ambition of Ovid's design. Examination of the shared episodes displays Ovid's large interconnections, particularly within the poem's books, which are held to be significant structures. The role of length and brevity in the poem is illuminated by the papyrus. The appendix discusses the structure of Metamorphoses 9, built on the opposition of gender.

This chapter explores the Heroides as short stories. It addresses aspects of brevity that involve more than Quellenforschung; brevity, as envisaged here, works as a catalyst that sets off a complex war of supremacy within the collection. The heroines' short stories reveal the heroines' daring protest against the mega-narratives of the past, but their fervent rhetoric also encompasses their creator.

This chapter examines Schwob's account of biography as the basis for the literariness of literature. Biography's concerns with the unique and the individual — often in the form of incidental details to be found in the record of a person's life — are, according to Schwob, precisely those of literature itself. Brevity is a concomitant necessity for the biographer. Schwob possessed considerable erudition of the kind usually associated with the biographical dictionary, but he exploits it to privilege the unique biographical detail. Like Nerval, his texts do not just borrow or reinvent the biographical genre, but may be read as reflections on the principles of biography. With Schwob literature and biography become one, and biography provides the means of defining the literariness of literature.

This chapter provides a theoretical basis for the discussion of individual works in subsequent chapters. Taking examples from the Latin prose rendition of Phaedran fables known as the Romulus vulgaris, it analyses ‘how animals mean’ in beast fable, emphasizing the deliberate brevity and sparseness of fable narrative, and connecting these features with the mistrust of words that fable characteristically teaches. In contrast, in beast epic (represented here by the Ysengrimus), words proliferate, and the simple moral conclusion in which the action of beast fable culminates is dissolved in a sea of animal moralizing whose effect is comic rather than didactic. Beast fable and beat epic also differ in their relation to historical reality: whereas fable is a‐historical in itself but can be used as a whole to comment on a historical situation, epic can incorporate topical satire into its narrative.

This chapter examines the desert war experience of the British Army during the period from 1940 to 1942. The British were defeated three times by the Germans and the Axis forces in operations Brevity, Battleaxe, and Crusader. This defeat highlighted the weakness of the British Army in combined arms operation and showed the greater institutional experience of the Axis forces at the tactical level. The Axis forces' formation was so organized that motorized artillery and tanks could quickly provide each other with mutual support.

This chapter examines the phenomenon of the demise of operas. Although not the only one, Wagner was someone who left an indelible stamp on twentieth-century opera. Every figure of importance is said to have reacted to him, and rarely indifferently. The (now underestimated) literary impact of Wagner's manifestos against opera contributed to its supposed demise not only with polemical brevity but also with eye-crossing tedium in longer theoretical treatises that nevertheless seem to have impressed influential figures in the later part of the nineteenth century. Finally, the chapter suggests that Wagner's influence raised the stakes of opera to such a pitch that it proved extremely difficult for those after him to choose the right form of musical dramaturgy, and to reconcile that choice with the heavy demands placed on works of art in the modern era.

The chapter covers the author’s first experiences of being at a film pitching session in Australia, and goes on to illustrate how best to pitch in today’s competitive world. Though written with much humour and extensive use of amusing anecdotes, the chapter if full of very sane advice in approaching one of the essential tools for bringing a film to market

This chapter outlines the tradition of the epigram in the Classical, Medieval and Renaissance periods, with particular focus on the influence of Martial, Catullus, and the Greek Anthology. Despite the genre’s reputation for licentiousness and cynicism, it came to be used for a wide variety of subjects. However, a commitment to brevity and sharpness of wit distinguished the genre regardless of subject and was often noted by Renaissance theorists. The chapter also explores some more limited influences, such as the medieval proverbial epigram, on the Renaissance use of the genre.

This chapter commences by contextualising the politics of motherhood in light of the feminist writings of Shulamith Firestone, Adrienne Rich and Julia Kristeva. The literary analysis focuses on the control of women’s bodies and societal expectations in the work of Roberts and how the critique of motherhood apparent in these narratives reflects a tendency of much second-wave feminist thought. The second section considers the writings of Simpson and how she invokes the narrative brevity of the short story to heighten the sense of spatial constraint the female protagonist’s, who are mothers, experience; but also the temporal constraints felt by those without a child, who are aware of their ageing bodies. ‘Maternal Loss’ explores the ambivalence at the heart of motherhood and feminism while questioning how understandings of the maternal contain broader meanings and significance across cultures and in the context of migration narratives. The concluding commentary engages with the topic of feminist generations and reflects on the ways in which motherhood has been explored and re-worked as a central feminist motif across various cultural moments since the 1980s.

Chapter 4 supports by means of collateral evidence the claim that Hume woke Kant by attacking the principle of sufficient reason. First, it considers Treatise 1.3.3, though without supposing that Kant knew this text, in order to show that there, where Kemp Smith and others thought Hume was attacking the principle that every event has a cause, he was actually attacking the principle of sufficient reason. Second, it explains Hume’s lack of explicitness in the Enquiry about the fact that he was attacking the principle of sufficient reason; he avoided explicitness on this score, I argue, in order to veil his antitheological intentions. Third, it examines Sulzer’s commentary on Enquiry Section 4, which Kant surely knew well, to show that Sulzer read Section 4 as attacking the principle of sufficient reason. The fact that Kant’s contemporaries such as Sulzer and Tetens read Hume in this way makes it plausible to suppose that Kant did too.

This chapter continues to develop a picture of Vitruvian expertise by interrogating the implications of Vitruvius’s repeated characterization of his text as a complete body marked by brevitas. The corpus hominis bene figurati in book 3 (so-called Vitruvian man) is reconsidered for its relevance to the corpus of De architectura as a text. The body and its parts remain powerful metaphors for composition: a body is complete and well ordered, and provides a “lifelike” mimesis of what it represents. Despite ancient and some modern claims to the contrary, textual bodies never embrace the comprehensive wholes with which they are associated and, in the Roman period, are rarely politically disinterested. Textual bodies are often emphatically reductive and, as such, mediate various wholes and universals through synopsis and other forms of “definition.” Such a bodily metaphor is especially appropriate for Vitruvius’s “expert” text. Examples from Plato, Aristotle, Cicero’s letters, and the so-called universal historians show that the textual “body” (also often described as “brief”) involved specific, ideological value before Vitruvius. His claims to have ordered the synoptic body of architecture properly suggest an analogous ideological function. Physical bodies are “compositions” of nature, so the author’s claims to have put a textual body in good order mimic nature’s sense of what is appropriate. This is another quality particular to experts. Such expertise has implications well beyond the proprietary fields on which they lay claim. By cordoning off the true totality of architecture from the reader, the guiding corpus metaphor of De architectura is basically restrictive.

Lydia Davis’s “flash fictions” shift our attention from narrative to verbal craft, evident in her resolute choice of words, syntax, and sentence rhythms. An abbreviated style compels readers to focus on fully stopped moments, an effect that defies narrative progression much as do Joy Williams’s and Alice Munro’s discontinuous stories. Like them as well, the development of a later style is a matter of branching into new directions—in her case, continuing a microscopic fascination with individual words and their resonances, but now shifting toward found objects (Flaubert’s letters), or letters of complaint, or grammatical puzzles: all as “witness” narratives revealing the ways in which the mundane minutiae of life is transformed into art. The borders between fiction and nonfiction become less clear, as Davis presses on the boundaries of what a short story can be.

This chapter considers shorter forms of fiction. It looks at some prominent arguments on the case for brevity and the modern subject. Some commentators such as Frank O’Connor, H. E. Bates, and Elizabeth Bowen — all fine practitioners of the short story and its most astute critics at mid-century — suggested that short forms, by dint of their shortness, had a unique capacity to represent the lived condition of modernity. All these commentators appear to argue the same thing: that short stories are better adapted to the cultural moment of technological modernity than are long ones. They also predict great things for them.