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Short Fictions of Improvement by James Hogg and Walter Scott

Gerard Lee McKeever

in Dialectics of Improvement: Scottish Romanticism, 1786-1831

This chapter reads James Hogg and Walter Scott within a new, revisionist history of short fiction that is particularly interested in the genre of the ‘tale’. Focusing on the half-decade between 1827 ... More

This chapter reads James Hogg and Walter Scott within a new, revisionist history of short fiction that is particularly interested in the genre of the ‘tale’. Focusing on the half-decade between 1827 and 1831, the chapter highlights a selection of Hogg’s mature contributions to Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine alongside Scott’s Chronicles of the Canongate (first series). These years were marked by literary experimentation, when a confident improving persuasion in Scottish culture was threatening to unravel. The formal logic of these short fictions, defined by a curiously focused spontaneity, exacerbates a pluralistic handling of the collision between improvement and tradition. Different models of time (progress, renewal, disruption) and belief (suspension, scepticism, credulity) serve to interrogate improvement in a wide range of contexts around commercial modernisation. The chapter unpacks two specific literary innovations in this context. The first looks to acts of transmission in the literary marketplace which by turns sustain, contain and defer the dialectics of improvement. The second sees the emergence of a fully fledged aesthetic vocabulary of culture in Scott’s writing.Less

Introduction

TIM FARRANT

in Balzac's Shorter Fictions: Genesis and Genre

This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of the purpose of this book, which is to explore Balzac's short stories in the light of their genesis, as individual fictional entities, in relation ... More

This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of the purpose of this book, which is to explore Balzac's short stories in the light of their genesis, as individual fictional entities, in relation to others, and in the context of his work's overall development. Short stories make up over half La Comédie humaine, in addition to the thirty published Contes drolatiques, and scores of other narratives and newspaper articles. Balzac's writing career began with short fiction — the first trace of narrative in his work is an anecdote — and ended with it, to all intents and purposes, in what are vastly expanded stories, Le Cousin Pons and La Cousine Bette.Less

Conclusion: Balzac's Shorter Fictions

Tim Farrant

in Balzac's Shorter Fictions: Genesis and Genre

This chapter presents some concluding thoughts. The first half of Balzac's career was a general movement from conte to novel; the remainder, a development of the conte alongside and within the novel. ... More

This chapter presents some concluding thoughts. The first half of Balzac's career was a general movement from conte to novel; the remainder, a development of the conte alongside and within the novel. But, in absolute terms, there is no end to Balzac's brevities. They are present in the contes and nouvelles of the Comédie; in innumerable articles and scenes; and in the bite-sized units of even his longest works. The relation between petit and grand, between shorter and longer fiction, lies at the heart of his opus. Short fiction, far from being a transient phenomenon, is the cradle and crucible of Balzac's enterprise: it is the Urform of his creation as a whole.Less

How to Be Yourself – But Not Eccentric: Clothes, Style and Self in Bowen’s Short Fiction

Aimee Gasston

in Elizabeth Bowen: Theory, Thought and Things

If Bowen can be said to ‘indulge’ and ‘antagonize […] modernist theory and practice’ (Hunter 113), a key question is whether it was her extra-experimentalism that ensured her sidelining from the ... More

If Bowen can be said to ‘indulge’ and ‘antagonize […] modernist theory and practice’ (Hunter 113), a key question is whether it was her extra-experimentalism that ensured her sidelining from the prototypical modernist canon. Critics such as Susan Osborn have described Bowen’s texts as being written in a ‘queer, opaque style’, one that ‘realizes itself not solely as a style to be looked through but as a style to be looked at as well’ (194). Following this line of thought, this chapter examines the stylised, patterned rendering of Bowen’s short fiction as a type of dress and consider its relationship with personal statement. It explores Bowen’s material style as ‘the dress of thought’ in opposition to what she saw as the common flaw of modern short fiction; ‘too much prose draped around an insufficiently vital feeling’, and consider the material detail of her stories not as frivolous frippery but as a key technical expression of her contingent view of the world (Hepburn 250).Less

Joseph Conrad’s blindness

Andrew Bennett

in Ignorance: Literature and Agnoiology

This chapter considers the problem of literary ignorance using the perspective of the nature of narrative form. It studies the narrative form of Joseph Conrad's short stories, and suggests that a ... More

This chapter considers the problem of literary ignorance using the perspective of the nature of narrative form. It studies the narrative form of Joseph Conrad's short stories, and suggests that a literary agnoiology would be partly able to account for the problem of Conrad's fiction and its relation to his life. The chapter notes that the inability to see – which is, in this sense, nescience – is natural not only to the thematics of Conrad's ‘short’ fiction and to his life, but also to the process of composition, the nature of short-story writing and to Conrad's poetics of the short and long story.Less

‘The Magazine Short Story and the Real Short Story’: Consuming Fiction in the Feminist Weekly Time and Tide

Catherine Clay

in Women's Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1918-1939: The Interwar Period

This chapter examines the short fiction content of the feminist weekly Time and Tide alongside readers’ letters printed in the periodical’s correspondence columns. A basic unit of magazine production ... More

This chapter examines the short fiction content of the feminist weekly Time and Tide alongside readers’ letters printed in the periodical’s correspondence columns. A basic unit of magazine production the short story is also ‘definitional to modernism’ (Armstrong 2005: 52), and during the interwar period its status as commodity or art became the subject of increasing scrutiny and debate. Drawing on examples from amateur writers and well-known figures such as E. M. Delafield, the chapter explores how Time and Tide negotiated readers’ expectations for short fiction amongst its core target audience of women readers. Building on Fionnuala Dillane’s application of affect theory to periodical studies (2016), the chapter uses her concept of ‘discursive disruption’ to consider moments of conflict between Time and Tide and its readers over the short stories it published as moments of opportunity for the periodical to expand its scope, readership and brow, and renegotiate its position in the literary marketplace.Less

“Double Discourse” in the Illustrated Tales of the 1890s

in The Illustration of the Master: Henry James and the Magazine Revolution

This chapter explores the impact of magazine publishing in the final decade of the nineteenth century on Henry James's short stories in terms of material appearance, content, and composition. It ... More

This chapter explores the impact of magazine publishing in the final decade of the nineteenth century on Henry James's short stories in terms of material appearance, content, and composition. It looks at the scope of technological advances in print culture during the period by presenting a sampling of illustrations for James's short fiction from the late 1860s through the early 1890s. It then examines the hermeneutic implications of this “magazine revolution” for the analysis of James's short fiction by offering four case studies of his illustrated tales of the 1890s. The chapter discusses the ways in which magazines imagined their reader-spectators, along with the uneasy relationship of James's fiction with the editorial practices of the specialty venues and advertising-sponsored forums in which it appeared. Finally, it considers how these circumstances affected the subjects and structures of James's later stories about authors and artists.Less

Towards the Comédie, 1840–1841

TIM FARRANT

in Balzac's Shorter Fictions: Genesis and Genre

This chapter shows that Balzac’s shorter fictions in the period 1838–1841 embody manifold tensions: between the individual and the type, the centrifugal and the centripetal, between the cohesion and ... More

This chapter shows that Balzac’s shorter fictions in the period 1838–1841 embody manifold tensions: between the individual and the type, the centrifugal and the centripetal, between the cohesion and self-containedness of single narratives, and that of the creation as a whole. Such dichotomies, fostered by the modes of production and publication of Balzac’s creation post-1840, answer those between univocal morality, and plurivocal relativism brought by narrative fragmentation and prolongation in serialized works, and by the use of recurring characters. The year 1842 was to see the inauguration of La Comédie humaine: within its overarching and ostensibly single and unifying structure, these conflicting yet complementary characteristics were to be laid out. The mosaic was to become a monument. Or rather, a monumental mosaic.Less

Introduction

Elke D’hoker and Chris Mourant

in The Modern Short Story and Magazine Culture, 1880–1950

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 ... More

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.Less

Stopped Clocks

Beryl Pong

in British Literature and Culture in Second World Wartime: For the Duration

Chapter 3 begins by examining a prominent trope in photographs of the home front: the stopped clock. Unpacking the manifold, often competing, meanings of this image—by turns denoting suspension and ... More

Chapter 3 begins by examining a prominent trope in photographs of the home front: the stopped clock. Unpacking the manifold, often competing, meanings of this image—by turns denoting suspension and dislocation, but also temporal resilience and transcendence—it underscores how the photographic medium corroborates or problematizes the temporalities portrayed within its frames. The chapter then turns to the short stories of Elizabeth Bowen and William Sansom, both of whom variously conceived of their own writing as ‘photographic’. Rendering a temporality somewhere between what Frank Kermode, in narratological terms, called ‘tick-tock’ and ‘tock-tick’, Bowen’s and Sansom’s fragmented short stories blended fiction with non-fiction, and were ultimately anthologized as ‘records’ of the war.Less

Finding his Own Uses for Things: The Short Fiction

Gary Westfahl

in William Gibson

This chapter discusses William Gibson's short fiction. Among Gibson's early short stories are “Fragments of a Hologram Rose” (1977), which introduces the theme of virtual reality; “The Gernsback ... More

This chapter discusses William Gibson's short fiction. Among Gibson's early short stories are “Fragments of a Hologram Rose” (1977), which introduces the theme of virtual reality; “The Gernsback Continuum” (1981), his first metafictional consideration of science fiction and its effects; “Johnny Mnemonic” (1981), which first involves the underworld of the Sprawl, the vast megalopolis stretching down America's East Coast; and “Burning Chrome” (1982), which adds the ingredient of cyberspace. “The Gernsback Continuum” pays fond tribute to the prophecies of science fiction writers and futurists of the 1920s and 1930s, and ponders how their visions still influence residents of a future they failed to predict. This chapter examines other Gibson stories, including “The Belonging Kind” (1981, with John Shirley), “Hinterlands” (1981), “The Winter Market” (1985), “Doing Television” (1990), and “Thirteen Views of a Cardboard City” (1997).Less

The Short Story in Aotearoa/New Zealand

Dougal Mcneill

in The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume 12: The Novel in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the South Pacific Since 1950

This chapter discusses the history of the short story in Aotearoa/New Zealand, arguing that the genre's cultural centrality is, from 1950, displaced at the very moment its literary viability becomes ... More

This chapter discusses the history of the short story in Aotearoa/New Zealand, arguing that the genre's cultural centrality is, from 1950, displaced at the very moment its literary viability becomes assured. It considers how shifts in publishing practices and audience consumption patterns allowed all manner of literary writing, short fiction included, to flourish. The chapter examines the development of Pākehā short fiction during the periods 1950–1968 and it traces the parallel development of Maōri short fiction after 1950, and how the journal Te Ao Hou (1952–1976) promoted Maōri writing in English which has flourished since the 1970s. Finally, it shows how the New Zealand short story has fared in the 1980s and beyond.Less

Novel, Novella, Short Story

Adrian Hunter

in The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume 7: British and Irish Fiction Since 1940

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 ... More

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.Less

Benford’s Short Fiction

George Slusser

in Gregory Benford

This chapter focuses on Gregory Benford's short fiction. The short story is widely considered the essential form for science fiction (SF). Indeed, many of the most esteemed SF novels began as an ... More

This chapter focuses on Gregory Benford's short fiction. The short story is widely considered the essential form for science fiction (SF). Indeed, many of the most esteemed SF novels began as an idea-packed short story, which the author subsequently elaborates (often with less success) into a larger narrative. Since his first published story “Stand In” appeared in 1965 in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Benford has published a large number of short stories in magazines and in anthologies. He collected many of his best stories in two landmark volumes, In Alien Flesh (1986) and Matter's End, followed by three more recent anthologies: Worlds Vast and Various (1999), Immersion and Other Short Novels (2002), and Anomalies: Collected Stories (2012). This chapter examines two of Benford's short stories, “Exposures” (1981) and “Mozart on Morphine” (1989).Less

The Short Story in Canada

W. H. New

in The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume 12: The Novel in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the South Pacific Since 1950

This chapter discusses the history of short fiction in Canada. The first decade of the twenty-first century witnessed several social changes that affected the publication of short stories in Canada. ... More

This chapter discusses the history of short fiction in Canada. The first decade of the twenty-first century witnessed several social changes that affected the publication of short stories in Canada. Electronic media began to impinge on print media, and bookstores, especially the small independents, were forced to shut down due to competition from big box stores, online companies, and electronic downloading practices. The chapter examines important developments that contributed to the growth of the Canadian short story, including the establishment in 1970-71 of the Montreal Storytellers Fiction Performance Group and the publication in 1985 of the first collection of contemporary Canadian speculative fiction, Tesseracts, edited by Judith Merril. It also considers works by late twentieth-century writers, who focused on post-nationalism, third-wave feminism, post-realism, and post-temporality.Less

Between the Fields

Lamed Shapiro

in The Cross and Other Jewish Stories

This chapter presents the text of Lamed Shapiro's short fiction titled Between the Fields. It explains that the story is about a locomotive that accidentally destroyed a cornfield after its rail was ... More

This chapter presents the text of Lamed Shapiro's short fiction titled Between the Fields. It explains that the story is about a locomotive that accidentally destroyed a cornfield after its rail was disconnected.Less