Table of Contents

List of contributors; Acknowledgements; Introduction Dominic Head; 1. Early modern diversity: the origins of English short fiction Barbara Korte; 2. Short prose narratives of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Donald J. Newman; 3. Gothic and Victorian supernatural tales Jessica Cox; 4. The Victorian potboiler: novelists writing short stories Sophie Gilmartin; 5. Fable, myth and folktale: the writing of oral and traditional story forms Andrew Harrison; 6. The colonial short story, adventure and the exotic Robert Hampson; 7. The Yellow Book circle and the culture of the literary magazine Winnie Chan; 8. The modernist short story: fractured perspectives Claire Drewery; 9. War stories: the short story in World Wars I and II Ann-Marie Einhaus; 10. The short story in Ireland to 1945: a national literature Heather Ingman; 11. The short story in Ireland since 1945: a modernizing tradition Heather Ingman; 12. The short story in Scotland: from oral tale to dialectal style Timothy C. Baker; 13. The short story in Wales: cultivated regionalism Jane Aaron; 14. The understated art, English style Dean Baldwin; 15. The rural tradition in the English short story Dominic Head; 16. Metropolitan modernity: stories of London Neal Alexander; 17. Gender and genre: short fiction, feminism and female experience Sabine Coelsch-Foisner; 18. Queer short stories: an inverted history Brett Josef Grubisic and Carellin Brooks; 19. Stories of Jewish identity: survivors, exiles and cosmopolitans Axel Stähler; 20. New voices: multicultural short stories Abigail Ward; 21. Settler stories: postcolonial short fiction Victoria Kuttainen; 22. After Empire: postcolonial short fiction and the oral tradition John Thieme; 23. Ghost stories and supernatural tales Ruth Robbins; 24. The detective story: order from chaos Andrew Maunder; 25. Frontiers: science fiction and the British marketplace Paul March-Russell; 26. Weird stories: the potency of horror and fantasy Roger Luckhurst; 27. Experimentalism: self-reflexive and postmodernist stories David James; 28. Satirical stories: estrangement and social critique Sandie Byrne; 29. Comedic short fiction Richard Bradford; 30. Short story cycles: between the novel and the story collection Gerald Lynch; 31. The novella: between the novel and the story Gerri Kimber; 32. The short story visualized: adaptations and screenplays Linda Costanzo Cahir; 33. The short story anthology: shaping the canon Lynda Prescott; 34. The institution of creative writing Ailsa Cox; 35. Short story futures Julian Murphet; Bibliography; Index.

Promotional Information

A comprehensive overview of the English short story, charting its origins and development through to the present day.

About the Author

Dominic Head is Professor of Modern English Literature at the University of Nottingham, where he served as Head of School from 2007–10. He has written extensively on forms of literature and is author of The Modernist Short Story (Cambridge, 1992) and The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction, 1950–2000 (Cambridge, 2002), and editor of The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English, 3rd edition (Cambridge, 2006).

Reviews

'… the book covers enormous ground - colonial stories, rural stories, queer stories, comic stories - and makes room for obscure writers beside the heavyweights … with this approach, an expert writes each chapter. Highlights include Heather Ingman on the Irish short story and Roger Luckhurst on weird fiction, that amorphous zone between horror, fantasy and surrealism.' Chris Power, New Statesman