A Companion to the American Short Story

A Companion to the American Short Story traces the development of this versatile literary genre over the past two centuries. Written by leading critics in the field, and edited by two major scholars, it explores a wide range of writers, from Edgar Allen Poe and Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin, and Charles Chesnutt at the end of the nineteenth century.   In the twentieth the focus is on such important Modern writers as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Richard Wright before moving into the contemporary period with essays on Raymond Carver, Saul Bellow, and Denise Chávez.   Contributions with a broader focus address groups of multiethnic, Asian, and Jewish writers. All the essays set the short story in context, focusing on the interaction of cultural forces and aesthetic principles. The Companion takes account of cutting edge approaches to literary studies and contributes to the ongoing redefinition of the American canon, embracing genres such as ghost and detective fiction, cycles of interrelated short fiction, and comic, social and political stories. The volume also reflects the diverse communities that have adopted this literary form and made it their own, featuring entries on a variety of feminist and multicultural traditions. This volume presents an important new consideration of the role of the short story in the literary history of American literature.

Notes on Contributors. Acknowledgments. Part I: The Nineteenth Century. 1 The Emergence and Development of the American Short Story ( Alfred Bendixen ). 2 Poe and the American Short Story ( Benjamin F. Fisher ). 3 A Guide to Melville′s "Bartleby, the Scrivener" ( Steven T. Ryan ). 4 Towards History and Beyond: Hawthorne and the American Short Story ( Alfred Bendixen ). 5 Charles W. Chesnutt and the Fictions of a "New" America ( Charles Duncan ). 6 Mark Twain and the American Comic Short Story ( David E. E. Sloane ). 7 New England Local–Color Literature: A Colonial Formation ( Josephine Donovan ). 8 Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Feminist Tradition of the American Short Story ( Martha J. Cutter ). 9 The Short Stories of Edith Wharton ( Donna Campbell ). Part II: The Transition into the New Century. 10 The Short Stories of Stephen Crane ( Paul Sorrentino ). 11 Kate Chopin ( Charlotte Rich ). 12 Frank Norris and Jack London ( Jeanne Campbell Reesman ). 13 From "Water Drops" to General Strikes: Nineteenth– and Early Twentieth–Century Short Fiction and Social Change ( Andrew J. Furer ). Part III: The Twentieth Century. 14 The Twentieth Century: A Period of Innovation and Continuity ( James Nagel ). 15 The Hemingway Story ( George Monteiro ). 16 William Faulkner’s Short Stories ( Hugh Ruppersburg ). 17 Katherine Anne Porter ( Ruth M. Alvarez ). 18 Eudora Welty and the Short Story: Theory and Practice ( Ruth D. Weston ). 19 The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Structure, Narrative Technique, Style ( Kirk Curnutt ). 20 “The Look of the World”: Richard Wright on Perspective ( Mikko Tuhkanen ). 21 Small Planets: The Short Fiction of Saul Bellow ( Gloria L. Cronin ). 22 John Updike ( Robert M. Luscher ). 23 Raymond Carver in the Twenty–First Century ( Sandra Lee Kleppe ). 24 Multi–Ethnic Female Identity and Denise Chávez′s The Last of the Menu Girls  ( Karen Weekes ). Part IV: Expansive Considerations. 25 Landscape as Haven in American Women′s Short Stories ( Leah B. Glasser ). 26 The American Ghost Story ( Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock ). 27 The Detective Story ( Catherine Ross Nickerson ). 28 The Asian American Short Story ( Wenying Xu ). 29 The Jewish American Story ( Andrew Furman ). 30 The Multiethnic American Short Story ( Molly Crumpton Winter ). 31 "Should I Stay or Should I Go?" American Restlessness and the Short–Story Cycle ( Jeff Birkenstein ). Index.

  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.

"This accessible and attractive volume is split into four sections offering a history of the American short story. The first three are presented chronologically, with chapters on stories from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and a transitional period in between . . . For all readers, it is what such a Companion should be–a ladder that the newly enthused short–story reader will climb, only to move onto higher ground." (Routledge ABES, 2011)