A Companion To The American Short Story

by Bendixen, Alfred; Nagel, James

• ISBN13: 9781405115438
• ISBN10: 1405115432
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-03-15
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

A Companion to the American Short Story traces the development of this versatile literary genre over the past 200 years. Sets the short story in context, paying attention to the interaction of cultural forces and aesthetic principles Contributes to the ongoing redefinition of the American canon, with close attention to the achievements of women writers as well as such important genres as the ghost story and detective fiction Embraces diverse traditions including African-American, Jewish-American, Latino, Native-American, and regional short story writing Includes a section focused on specific authors and texts, from Edgar Allen Poe to John Updike

Author Biography

 Alfred Bendixen, Professor of English at Texas A& M University, is the founder of the American Literature Association, which he currently serves as Executive Director.  His books include Haunted Women (1985), an edition of the composite novel, The Whole Family (1986), "The Amber Gods" and other stories by Harriet Prescott Spofford, (1989), and Edith Wharton: New Critical Essays (1992). He is the associate editor of the Continuum Encyclopedia of American Literature (1999), the co-editor of the recently published Cambridge Companion to American Travel Writing (2009), and one of the five contributing editors to the forthcoming Wadsworth Anthology of American Literature.

James Nagel is the Eidson Distinguished Professor of American Literature at the University of Georgia. Early in his career he founded the scholarly journal Studies in American Fiction and the widely influential series Critical Essays on American Literature. Among his twenty books are Stephen Crane and Literary Impressionism, Hemingway in Love and War (which was made into a Hollywood film directed by Lord Richard Attenborough), and The Contemporary American Short-Story Cycle. He has published some eighty articles in the field, and he has lectured on American literature in fifteen countries. In 2005, he was given the lifetime achievement award for contributions to the field by the American Literature Association.

Table of Contents

Notes on Contributors

Acknowledgments

The Nineteenth Century

The Emergence and Development of the American Short Story

Poe and the American Short Story

A Guide to Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener"

Towards History and Beyond: Hawthorne and the American Short Story

Charles W. Chesnutt and the Fictions of a "New" America

Mark Twain and the American Comic Short Story

New England Local-Color Literature: A Colonial Formation

Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Feminist Tradition of the American Short Story

The Short Stories of Edith Wharton

The Transition into the New Century

The Short Stories of Stephen Crane

Kate Chopin

Frank Norris and Jack London

From "Water Drops" to General Strikes: Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Short Fiction and Social Change

The Twentieth Century

The Twentieth Century: A Period of Innovation and Continuity

The Hemingway Story

William Faulkner's Short Stories

Katherine Anne Porter

Eudora Welty and the Short Story: Theory and Practice

The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Structure, Narrative Technique, Style

The Look of the World: Richard Wright on Perspective

Small Planets: The Short Fiction of Saul Bellow

John Updike

Raymond Carver in the Twenty-First Century

Multi-Ethnic Female Identity and Denise Chávez's The Last of the Menu Girls

Expansive Considerations

Landscape as Haven in American Women's Short Stories

The American Ghost Story

The Detective Story

The Asian American Short Story

The Jewish American Story

The Multiethnic American Short Story

"Should I Stay or Should I Go?" American Restlessness and the Short-Story Cycle

Index

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