Week 1 Flashcards
What is a short story?
The short story is commonly defined as a brief work of prose fiction which – like longer prose fiction such as the novel – organizes the action, thought and dialogue of its characters into the artful pattern of plot, directed toward particular effects on an audience. Usually focuses on a single event, with only 1 or 2 characters. Different from an anecdote in that it is developed into an artful pattern to form a plot. Begun close to climax.
Why is EA Poe important?
He is often called the originator of the short story as an established genre and who at any rate was its first critical theorist.
What is a sketch?
Shorter than a short story, less developed, self-contained, often a dramatic scene.
What is a novella?
Longer than a short story. Usually focus on a single or chain of events, with a surprising turning point.
What is a tale?
‘Tale of incident’ or ‘tale of character’. They have different focuses.
American periods of literary history (Abrams)
1607–1775: The Colonial Period
1828–1865, the Romantic Period, aka the American Renaissance, and the Age of Transcendentialism
1865–1914: End of Civil War and Reconstruction to beginning of World War I
1865-1900: the Realistic Period
1900–1914: the Naturalistic Period
1914–1939: Modernism
1939 to the Present = contemporary period
Post-Modernism = second half of the 20th century
OR: 1950s – 1980s
Post-Post-Modernism = last two decades
American periods of literary history (Eugene Current-Garcia / Walton R. Patrick)
Romanticism and the Beginnings: 1800-1860
Emerging Realism: 1860-1890
From Realism to Naturalism: 1890-1920
Postnaturalism – Tradition and Experimentation: 1920 to the Present [i. e. 1964]
Types of American short stories
The Search for Form (Irving, Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, James)
Regionalism and Realism (Twain, Harte, Howells, Jewett, Chopin, Gilman…)
A National Art Form (Crane, Wharton, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Hurston, Faulkner, Wright, Bellow, O’Connor, Malamud, Baldwin, Updike, Cheever…)
The Short Story Today (Barth, Barthelme, Coover, Paley, Oates, Walker, Silko, Erdrich…)
Romanticism and the Beginnings of the American Short Story: 1800–1860 (Eugene Current-Garcia / Walton R. Patrick)
the young nation was becoming culturally self-conscious
1815: the second successful war against England ended and Americans could boast of their military and political achievements
YET: no independent literary tradition and a lack of artistic and intellectual development
Cultural Independence of the USA: c. 1820s “American Naissance”
importance of short story
book and magazine publishers understandably filledtheir
pages with the more popular English literary works (which they could pirate freely) and often ignored the prior claims of American writers
between 1820 and 1860 the short story flourished in America
agrarian republic, BUT: literary periodicals such as North American Review, Knickerbocker Magazine, Graham’s, andSouthern Literary Messenger
adaptability of the short story to magazine publication
popularity and success of the short story
1820–1860: American writers of short stories followed European fashions, imitating the literary forms and conventions popular abroad = Romanticism
Originality of the US-American short story
What is a ‘short tale’?
‘short tale’ = outgrowth of the eighteenth-century sketchand periodical essay
strong popular appeal, were just coming to be realized when Irving took it up and fashioned it into a species of narrative that brought him immediate fame.
Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book (1820): the most famous stories are “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legendof Sleepy Hollow”
