Short Story

I

Introduction

Short Story, condensed fictional narrative, usually in prose. Typically concerning a relatively small number of characters involved in a single action with one thematic focus, short stories are aimed at exciting in the reader a single emotional response. The novel, by contrast, typically presents many characters more leisurely developed through several interconnecting story lines and conflicts and evokes a multiplicity of emotional reactions.

II

Forerunners

The most ancient tales are those of Egypt about 2000 bc (see Egyptian Literature); the fables of the Greek slave Aesop; and the retellings, by the Roman writers Ovid and Lucius Apuleius, of Greek and Oriental stories of magical transformations. Besides the perennially popular Indian story collection, the Panchatantra (pre-5th century ad), the major Oriental collection of nondidactic, nonmoralistic tales is undoubtedly the Arabian Nights. In this collection, a frame tale is employed: every night for 1001 nights, Scheherazade successfully prevents her husband, the sultan, from killing her by telling him interesting tales from various cultures.

Stories in all their variety flourished in western Europe during the Middle Ages. Romances, in prose or verse, many about knights in King Arthur's court, abounded in France. The English poet Geoffrey Chaucer and the Italian Giovanni Boccaccio preserved and refined the best the Middle Ages had to offer in the various genres of story. They retold (in prose or verse) fables, beast epics, exempla (didactic religious tales), romances, fabliaux (ribald tales of amorous or coarse adventure), and legends. Like the Arabian Nights, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio's Decameron incorporate the frame tale as a setting for other stories. Among Chaucer's most enjoyable tales are “The Miller's Tale”, a fabliau, and “The Nun's Priest's Tale”, a mock-heroic epic. “The Knight's Tale” is a superb representative of the romance. Boccaccio's tale of a man who sacrifices his falcon for the woman he loves displays all the formal perfection of the modern short story.

After Boccaccio, the short, realistic narrative in prose, known as the novella, blossomed as an art form in Italy. In France, Boccaccio's influence was seen in Les cent nouvelles nouvelles (c. 1460, The Hundred New Novelle), anonymous burlesque prose tales, and in the more decorous love stories of the Heptaméron (c. 1549) by Marguerite de Navarre. Also in France, in the 17th century, Jean de La Fontaine produced fables in verse that rivalled Aesop's. In 18th-century England, Joseph Addison and Sir Richard Steele published many stories—semifictional sketches of contemporary character types—in the magazine the Spectator; later, in the United States, Washington Irving satirized New York society in similar sketches.

III

The 19th Century

The short story as it is known today is a development of the 19th century, when popular and literary magazines began increasingly to publish short stories that often reflected the dominant literary modes of the day. In the early 19th century, Romanticism shaped the short fictions of Heinrich von Kleist and E. T. A. Hoffmann, in Germany; Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, in the United States; and Nikolay Gogol, in Russia. Realism took hold in France in the 1830s, followed at the end of the century by Naturalism, in which human interactions are viewed as scientifically predictable. Other stylistic influences on the 19th-century short story included Symbolism and regionalism.

A

The United States

Until the 19th century, the primary focus in most stories had been on the “what happened” element. Now writers began to concentrate on the motivations that propelled characters into conflict. At the same time, attention was directed to techniques of economic storytelling: artful structuring of events, exclusion of extraneous material, strict control and focusing of point of view, and selection of precisely appropriate diction. Poe was the first writer to so define the short story, in his review (1842) of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales (1837). Poe proved his artistic theory in several of his own tales. In “The Cask of Amontillado”, for example, he manipulated setting, character, and dialogue to lead the reader inexorably to the emotional state most appropriate for the perfect murder. Hawthorne's stories, on the other hand, seriously probed character and the moral significance of events, leaving their physical reality ambiguous. In “Young Goodman Brown”, the dark meetings in the woods of the townspeople of Salem occurred less certainly than did the spiritual changes in Brown himself.

In his preface to the definitive edition of his works, Henry James, one of the masters of the short story form, whose theories of fiction influenced generations of storytellers, emphasized the role of a “central intelligence” in shaping and filtering a story's materials. Thus, in his ghost story “The Jolly Corner”, James used the narrator to convey a sense of immediacy and of psychological realism. In “A Bundle of Letters” he experimented with point of view, presenting the story through a series of letters written by six people living in a French pension.