The American Short Story Handbook

The Handbook of the American Short Story is a concise yet comprehensive treatment of the topic that is designed to illuminate an important literary genre that has been given short scholarly shrift over the last century.  Written by a renowned literary scholar in accessible and engaging prose for students at all levels, it provides an historical overview of the topic, as well as discussion of notable American authors and individual stories. The author examines the literary history of the genre from Benjamin Franklin’s “The Speech of Miss Polly Baker” in 1747 to Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” in 1819 to “The Joy Luck Club”. He covers the intellectual and historical conditions that contributed to the stories of each age, the ideas and themes that emerged in the movement, and the artistic means of expression common to the era.  The book includes a selection of writers chosen not only for their contributions of individual stories but for their bodies of work that advanced the boundaries of short fiction.  The selected writers, including Edgar Allen Poe, Sarah Orne Jewett, Stephen Crane, Jamaica Kincaid, and Tim O’Brien, represent the chronological flow of the form, both genders, and a variety of ethnicities and nationalities.  The final section of the book offers detailed exegesis of 30 great individual stories. With a glossary of important terms and a bibliography for further study, this is a seminal introduction that will expand and challenge readers’ understanding of the American short story.

James Nagel is the Eidson Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Georgia and a Visiting Scholar at Dartmouth College, USA. He is President of the Society for the Study of the American Short Story and Former President of the International Ernest Hemingway Society.  Early in his career he founded the scholarly journal Studies in American Fiction and the widely influential series Critical Essays on American Literature , which published 156 volumes of scholarship.  Among his twenty–three books are Stephen Crane and Literary Impressionism (1980) , Hemingway in Love and War (1989, which was made into a Hollywood film starring Sandra Bullock), The Contemporary American Short–Story Cycle (2001) , Anthology of The American Short Story (2007), The Blackwell Companion to the American Short Story (Wiley Blackwell, 2010), and Race and Culture in Stories of New Orleans (2014) . He has been a Fulbright Professor as well as a Rockefeller Fellow. He has published some eighty articles in the field and lectured on American literature in fifteen countries .