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Special Section: The Short Story in Context

Introduction to Special Section: The Short Story in Context

Elke D'hoker
p. 19-26

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The editor would like to thank the readers involved in the peer-review process for their perceptive and constructive comments. In addition to the members of the reading committee of the Journal of the Short Story in English, these are Inge Arteel, Gert Buelens, Raphaël Ingelbien, Claudia Nelson, Hedwig Schwall, Pieter Vermeulen and Tom Vandevelde.

1Since the emergence of the modern short story as a distinct literary form in the second half of the nineteenth century, many critics and writers have sought to decide what it is exactly that distinguishes the short story from longer fiction, such as the novella or the novel. Is it a matter of “unity of impression,” as Edgar Allan Poe famously argued, or does a specific “poetics of brevity” characterize the form (Poe 60; Zumthor)? Does the short story address unique thematic concerns or existential questions, as critics from Frank O’Connor to Charles May have argued, or is it necessarily “a form of the margins,” offering itself “to losers and loners, exiles, women, blacks” (Hanson 2)? Are there stylistic features such as the epiphany, the ellipsis or the allusion that are essential to the form, and is “literary impressionism” its dominant aesthetic mode (Ferguson, March-Russell)? The matter is far from decided. All critics seem to agree upon is that “[i]n order to belong to the class of short stories, a text must be short” (Prince 325). Indeed, for Pascoe, a short story is “a short literary prose fiction” and Valerie Shaw defines it as a fictional text which achieves “a narrative purpose in a comparatively short space (Pascoe 411; Shaw 21).

2If the stylistic, narrative or thematic corollaries of this shortness have often been debated, its material or textual consequences have received far less attention. Still, a feature shared by many short stories is that they are usually published together with other texts. Indeed, the short story, because of its brevity, rarely stands alone. It appears as one text among others, whether in a newspaper or magazine, an anthology or collection, a short story cycle or short story sequence, on a website or in a twitter feed. This “polytextual” publication context (Monfort 158) characterizes the short story as a genre and has important consequences for the reception, production, development and contemporaneity of the form.

3The effect of the publication context on the reception of short fiction is readily discernible. Reading a story in a magazine is a very different experience from reading the same story in a collection or themed anthology. The magazine reader is likely to find the story set in columns, accompanied by illustrations that guide the reading process, and interrupted by advertisements. Moreover, the magazine story’s co-texts are typically journalistic pieces or non-fiction essays, which may provide the short story with unanticipated resonances. The context of an author’s collection, on the author hand, primes the reader to look out for recurring preoccupations, formal characteristics or thematic concerns. This interpretative activity is encouraged even more actively in the case of the short story cycle or short story sequence, in which individual stories may be interlinked in a variety of ways (Smith). The reading experience is different again in the case of an anthology, which brings together different stories on the basis of common characteristics, whether of the stories (e.g. setting, theme, topic, or time frame) or of their authors (e.g. class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity or nationality). These characteristics, which are usually identified in the title and further highlighted in the preface, serve to steer the interpretation in a determined direction (D’hoker).

4As some of these examples already suggest, the publication context may also have an impact on the writing and, hence, on the form and content, of the short story. For the short story cycle, Forest Ingram has convincingly shown how authors write—or rewrite—stories to fit the overall structure, unity or narrative emplotment of the collection as a whole and also writers invited to contribute to certain themed anthologies are likely to tailor their contribution to the book’s overall aim or focus. With regard to periodical publication too, several studies have shown that that authors keep the magazine’s profile, ideology and readership in mind when writing short stories for magazine publication (Baldwin 67-94; Eggermont).

5Viewed from a historical perspective too, the presence and modalities of certain publication contexts have had a considerable impact on the development of the short story as a genre. As several critics have argued (Baldwin, Chan), the rise of the modern short story in the 1880s was made possible by the exponential growth of the magazine market. Following the famous example of The Strand, more and more magazines made it their policy to publish only self-contained works of short fiction rather than the serialized novels that had been popular for much of the nineteenth century. As a result, the number of stories published rose dramatically and so did the diversity of the short fiction output: different magazines preferred different genres, topics and styles; and writers and agents became adept at pitching their story to the most appropriate—and best-paying—magazine. The end of this “golden age of storytellers” is similarly bound up with the publication context: as TV took over as the most popular form of entertainment, the number of magazines that published short fiction declined dramatically around 1950 and this had a major impact on the overall popularity, production and publication of short fiction (Ashley 1-16). Conversely, the more recent increase of literary magazines, in both digital and paper format, has been instrumental in reviving the popularity of the short form.

6Finally, the very shortness of the short story and its proximity to other texts in a variety of publication contexts also contribute to the genre’s openness to contemporary debates. The short story’s limited scope enables it to respond more quickly to current events, societal changes, new theories or trends and this propensity is of course further strengthened by the short story’s historical connection to the newspaper and magazine market. Next to the publication context, therefore, this discursive context is also important to take into account when analysing short fiction as recent studies such as Emma Young’s, Contemporary Feminism and Women’s Short Stories, Bettina Jansen’s Narratives of Community in the Black British Short Story and Anne-Marie Einhaus’s The Short Story and the First Word War amply demonstrate.

7Although both the material, textual and discursive contexts of the short story have received more attention in recent years, additional research is required to fully map the interactions between the short story and its contexts, both from a theoretical perspective and through individual case studies. To invite and promote such investigation was the aim of the third conference of the European Network for Short Fiction Research, held at the University of Leuven in May 2017. Over the course of three days, short story scholars and writers from all over Europe discussed the variegated aspects of the short story’s interface with its co-texts and contexts. Dean Baldwin and Yvon Houssais gave inspiring plenary lectures, while the invited writers and editors—Annelies Verbeke, Luca Ricci, Alison McLeod and Thomas Morris—read from their work and discussed the vicissitudes of contemporary short fiction publishing in a panel debate. Different papers addressed research questions concerning the impact of the changing publication contexts for short fiction on the status and development of the form; the textual resonances between individual stories in such polytextual contexts as the short story cycle, the anthology, or the collection; the interaction between short fiction and other media in magazines as well as digital contexts; the close ties between short fiction and its contemporaneous socio-political or cultural context; and the position of short stories within the larger context of an author’s oeuvre.

8Based on papers held at the conference, the articles in this special section offer a good cross-section of this ongoing research, as they all address different aspects of the short story’s contextual frames. In the first article, Alessandra Boller reads William Carleton’s “The Death of a Devotee” in its original context of publication, namely the Irish nineteenth-century periodical, The Christian Examiner, and Church of Ireland Magazine. Read in isolation, she argues, the religious, moral and political messages of this short story are (and have been) easily missed. Yet, when read next to other texts in this Protestant, and staunchly anti-Catholic, magazine, the story’s allusions to current religious and political debates become readily apparent. Boller concludes that Carleton clearly shaped his story so as to “contribute to the overall message The Christian Examiner sought to imprint on its readers.”

9The original periodical context also forms the starting point of Zoé Hardy’s reading of H.G. Wells’s “The Triumphs of a Taxidermist,” which was published in The Pall Mall Gazette in March 1894. Hardy argues, firstly, that the particular narrative set-up of the story creates the impression of a journalistic piece on taxidermy which, in the midst of the other non-fiction texts of The Pall Mall Gazette, could easily have confused contemporary readers. She then considers the story within the larger discursive context of the 1890s debate about the New Woman, and its attendant interrogation of the roles of men and women with regard to creation and procreation, art and nature. Finally, Hardy also places “The Triumphs of a Taxidermist” in its authorial context as she argues that the story’s concern with the tension between art and commerce meta-fictionally reflects Wells’s own anxieties at the start of his career as a best-selling writer.

10The authorial context also forms the starting point for Amândio Reis’s discussion of Henry James’s supernatural short stories. Yet, since James never published these stories in one volume, Reis leaves the authorial context behind for an investigation of three posthumous collections of James’s so-called ghost stories. Through preface, title, and structure, these collections clearly seek to frame and define these stories as a specific group, in order to delineate James’s take on the genre. Reis shows how small differences in contents between these collections create different polytextual contexts that have an impact on the reception of these stories and the definition of the Jamesian ghost story. Returning to James in the concluding part of his article, Reis argues that “the author’s exploration and renewal of the ghost story genre often materializes in his fiction in the narrative trope of the ghost text, a piece of writing always elusive and in most occasions hidden or destroyed, construed as the veritable haunting presence.”

11In “Ec-centric Women: Angela Carter and the Short Story Anthology,” Aleix Tura Vecino discusses a publication format that has mostly been ignored in short fiction studies, namely the short story anthology. Like Reis, he shows how the anthology creates meanings and resonances beyond those of the individual short stories through editorial processes of selection, juxtaposition and introduction. Focusing on Angela Carter’s 1986 anthology Wayward Girls and Wicked Women, Vecino argues that this anthology is ec-centric both because it cleverly subverts readerly associations conjured up by the title and because it refuses to pin down short fiction to a particular generic norm. Instead, the anthology celebrates heterogeneity both on a thematic and a formal level. Opening up his investigation to other women-only anthologies published in the 1980s and 1990s, Vecino further claims that these heterogeneous texts played an important role in highlighting women’s contributions to the short form, but also participated in the dissemination of post-structuralist conceptions of gender at the time.

12The two final articles, then, focus on contemporary short fiction. In his contribution, “The Short Story as Ecotext—Rick Bass’s ‘Fiber,’” Thomas Gurke reads Rick Bass’s short fiction within the discursive context of contemporary eco-critical theories and the authorial context of Bass’s own ecological activism. He argues that Bass’s short story collection The Lives of Rocks (2006) resonates with Tim Ingold’s concept of the meshwork on different levels. On a thematic level, the stories focus on the entanglements of human and non-human actors with their environment, while on a formal level the stories in the collection create a meshwork of intratextual links and echoes. Zooming in on the experimental story “Fiber,” Gurke further demonstrates how these entanglements are also realised within this particular story, which thus “creates something similar to the natural environment itself: not a set of fixed relations but the intransitive lines of a meshwork.”

13In the final contribution, Fanny Geuzaine discusses Neil Gaiman’s active and self-conscious engagement with the contemporary expansion of publication contexts for short fiction through various digital media. She argues that Gaiman’s dissemination of stories into an ever-expanding and multimedial storyworld invites readers to look beyond the boundaries of the individual stories and to consider them within this larger co-textual and contextual whole. Geuzaine demonstrates the workings of this transmedial form of storytelling through a reading of two short stories, “Feeders and Eaters” (1990) and “Troll Bridge” (1993). She argues that both stories desacralize human immortality only to re-sacralise it through the immortal act of storytelling. Moreover, Geuzaine also shows how the overt meta-fictional dimension of these stories serves to question traditional binaries of authenticity and repetition, copy and original, while celebrating the variegated nature of storytelling as a universal human act.

14A consideration of the act of storytelling—specifically in the form of the short story—is of course the common denominator of all the contributions to this special section. Each in its own way, the articles show how the act of storytelling does not happen in isolation, but is always part of a variety of contexts—material and discursive, authorial and generic, socio-political and literary—that shape an individual short story even while being shaped by it in turn. Though not exclusive to the short form, this contextual embeddedness may well be heightened by the short story’s close proximity to other texts in most of its publication contexts. While further research is still needed to gauge the impact of these polytextual publication contexts on the development and specificity of the short story as a genre, the articles collected here offer interesting and convincing case studies of co- and contextual embeddedness from the mid-nineteenth century to the present which would usefully underpin such a more general enquiry.

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Bibliographie

Ashley, Mike. The Age of the Storytellers: British Popular Fiction Magazines, 1880-1950. London: British Library, 2006. Print.

Baldwin, Dean. Art and Commerce in the British Short Story: 1880-1950. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013. Print.

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Elke D'hoker, « Introduction to Special Section: The Short Story in Context »Journal of the Short Story in English, 71 | 2018, 19-26.

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Elke D'hoker, « Introduction to Special Section: The Short Story in Context »Journal of the Short Story in English [En ligne], 71 | Autumn 2018, mis en ligne le 01 décembre 2020, consulté le 29 mars 2024. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/2138

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Elke D'hoker

KU Leuven Faculty of Arts

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