Studies in short fiction 

About: Studies in short fiction is an academic journal. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Political sociology & Narrative. It has an ISSN identifier of 0039-3789. Over the lifetime, 308 publications have been published receiving 1030 citations.

"For the Use of the Magazine Morons": Edith Wharton Rewrites the Tale of the Fantastic

Abstract: Edith Wharton's relationship with the reading public and the market economy was ambiguously made up of acceptance and resistance, desire and mistrust. She obviously sought success and dealt with her publishers in a very professional and business-like manner, yearned to establish a connection with her readers, but was aware of the dangers involved in lowering her literary standards to meet popular taste. In the latter part of her career, pressed by economic necessity and a decrease in popularity, she appeared at times more willing to compromise and come to terms with the requests of the marketplace.(1) Her rewriting of two tales of the fantastic, "Pomegranate Seed" (1931) and "All Souls'" (1937), is a good illustration of the delicate balance between the demands of the text and those of the public, and Wharton's differing degrees of success in maintaining it. These are Wharton's last "ghost stories," written toward the end of her life and generally considered among her best. Although they have received a good deal of recent critical attention, so far no examination of the stories' production and publishing problems has been conducted on the basis of the manuscripts.(2) I would like to offer here a reading of these two tales that takes into account their earlier manuscript versions and the substantial variants introduced in the published ones. I will try to explain the reasons for these changes by referring to some yet unpublished correspondence between the writer and her editors. I think that a closer look at Wharton's writing process will throw a different light on the narrative focus of the tales, partially undermining some earlier interpretations. My evaluation of the revisions, and of their impact on the final structure of the texts, will take into consideration Wharton's own ideas on the ghost story as a genre, as well as recent theories of the fantastic. In an early essay entitled "The Vice of Reading," Wharton stressed the importance of "an interchange of thought between writer and reader" (513), but she also exposed the harm to literature of what she called "the mechanical reader" in "bringing about the demand for mediocre writing" (519). In the "Preface" to Ghosts, the collection of tales of the supernatural published in 1937, she recalled: "When I first began to read, and then to write ghost-stories, I was conscious of a common medium between myself and my readers, of their meeting me half way among the primeval shadows, and filling in the gaps in my narrative with sensations and divinations akin to my own" (2). At the end of her career, Wharton had to come instead to the frustrating conclusion that "the faculty required for their enjoyment [of ghost stories] has become almost atrophied in modern man," and identified the causes in "those two world-wide enemies of the imagination, the wireless and the cinema," thus elaborating on this issue: "to a generation for whom everything which used to be won by an effort, and then slowly assimilated, is now served up cooked, seasoned and chopped into little bits, the creative faculty (for reading should be a creative act as well as writing) is rapidly withering, together with the power of sustained attention" (2). As an example of this unfortunate change in the reading public she referred to having been bombarded with anxious inquiries, following the first publication of "Pomegranate Seed," about "how a ghost could write a letter, or put it into a letterbox" (2). It is this kind of mechanical reader who undermines the effect of a tale of the fantastic and puts inappropriate demands on the writer. A letter from Rutger Jewett, Wharton's editor at Appleton, confirms this positivistic trend: "Every week since `Pomegranate Seed' was issued I have forwarded letters to you which have been sent me by the Post. Certainly the story aroused interest. I am wondering if the writers of these letters are trying to make you give a material, physical explanation of psychic phenomena. …

The tardy evolution of the British short story

Abstract: One of the more curious anomalies of literary history is why the short story was so late to blossom in Britain. By the 1840s the genre was already established in America, and within two decades it had taken root in Germany, Russia, and France. I am speaking here, of course, of the modern short story, defined loosely as Poe's story of "single effect," not simply of fiction shorter than the typical novel. This modern story did not achieve prominence in Britain until the 1880s, even though Britain would appear especially likely to develop the genre, since during the period of the story's "invention," if we may call it that, Britain was a world leader in the writing and dissemination of fiction. I believe that the late appearance of the modern short story in Britain can best be understood as a question of literary economics, and, in the essay that follows, I attempt to outline how the business of literary production, in combination with aesthetic and theoretical factors, retarded the evolution of the short story in Britain until late in the nineteenth century. It must be admitted at the outset that tracing the economic conditions that at first retarded and then encouraged the British short story after 1880 is not easy. The problem is not simply the usual one of trying to relate the complexities of audience, publication practices, and artistic propensities to the development of any literary phenomenon; it is also that the materials for such a study have not been gathered. By contrast, a considerable amount of work, both theoretical and statistical, has been done on the British and American novel to show the relationship between economics and the growth and development of that genre. Q. D. Leavis's Fiction and the Reading Public (1932) concerns the development of the reading audience. lan Watt's Rise of the Novel (1957) was among the early studies to link the popularity of the form with the growth of a middle-class readership. Richard Altick's English Common Reader (1957) contains a wealth of important information about the sociology of English readers and their tastes, but it touches only briefly on the short story. William Charvat's Literary Publishing in America 1790-1850 (1959) and his The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800-1870 (1968) cut across genres and have some useful things to say about the rise of magazines and the production of short stories, as does Frederick Lewis Pattee's The Development of the American Short Story (1923), but obviously, these studies focus on American literature. Since these early studies, there have been many more on various aspects of audience, economics, and literature, but again, the focus is on the novel: N. N. Feltes's Modes of Production of Victorian Novels (1986), James M. Brown, Dickens: Novelist in the Market-place (1982), Michael Anesko, Friction with the Market. Henry James and the Profession of Authorship (1986), James L. W. West III, American Authors and the Literary Marketplace Since 1900 (1988). Theoretical studies include Robert Escarpit, The Sociology of Literature (2nd ed, 1964), Per Gedin, Literature in the Marketplace (1977), and Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production (1978). All of this scholarship and much more--on the literary agent, the important literary magazines in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and on the literary aspects of the short story--have swirled around the economic and commercial aspects of the British short story without ever addressing the subject directly or in any detail. Another impediment to understanding the evolution of the British story has been the lack of historical studies focused on it. Rather recently, however, two detailed histories of the nineteenth-century British short story have appeared that lay the foundation for an economic study: Wendell Harris's British Short Fiction in the Nineteenth Century: A Literary and Bibliographic Guide (1979) and Harold Orel's The Victorian Short Story (1986). Together they provide an important literary history of the British short story. …

Gilman's Gothic Allegory: Rage and Redemption in The Yellow Wallpaper

Abstract: In the autumn of 1830, shortly hefore Emily Dickinson's birth, her mother made an unusual request. At a time when her pregnancy—or as it was then called, her \"confinement\"—might have heen expected to ahsorh her attention, Mrs. Dickinson ahruptly demanded new wallpaper for her hedroom. Apparently dismayed hy this outburst of feminine whimsy, her stern-tempered husband refused, prompting Mrs. Dickinson to her only recorded act of wifely defiance. Though \"the Hon. Edward Dickinson would not allow her to have it done,\" a neighbor's descendant recalled, \"she went secretly to the paper hanger and asked him to come and paper her hedroom. This he did, while Emily was being born.'\" Tb place this incident in context, we should be note that Mrs. Dickinson, aged twenty-six, had just moved into her father-in-law's Amherst mansion and now faced the grim prospect of living with her husband's unpredictable relatives, along with the even grimmer perils of early nineteenth-century childbirth. Although Mrs. Dickinson was hy most accounts a submissive, self-abnegating, rather neurasthenic woman—in short, the nineteenth-century ideal—it is tempting to read the wallpaper incident as a desperate gesture of autonomy and self-assertion. Emily Dickinson's most recent biographer, Cynthia Griffin Wolff, suggests that \"The little explosion of defiance signaled fear and distress, and it was the prelude to unhappy, silent acceptance.\"^ Though the color of Mrs. Dickinson's wallpaper went unrecorded, the anecdote forms a striking parallel to Charlotte Perkins Gilman's \"The Yellow Wallpaper,\" first published in 1892 but, like Emily Dickinson's

Samuel Beckett: The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989

Abstract: SAMUEL BECKETT: THE COMPLETE SHORT PROSE, 1929-1989, edited and with an introduction and notes by S E Gontarski New York: Grove Press, 1995 xxxii + 294 pages $23 This is an elegant and valuable work whose premises are impossible Beckett's writing, with its aspects of perfection and vulnerability, inspires both intimacy and loyalty It has the rhetorical power to make its readers feel that they want nothing less than fairness and good measure when it comes to response to the work, to feel offended by offense to the work, and to feel that this reaction must be common to readers of Beckett This desire for justice is well satisfied in this volume Beckett's short work has appeared and reappeared in journals and collections, often with various errors, so it is welcome that the more or less obvious errors and accidental alterations in the texts at least be corrected and a reputable edition of the work established S E Gontarski is the right person for the job: as author of valuable scholarly work on Beckett, and editor of the Journal of Beckett Studies, he has cared for Beckett's work intimately Gontarski's editorial decisions inspire confidence The volume's bibliography of Beckett's published short work is the most complete to date, and while this is a reading text and not an annotated scholarly edition, Gontarski's editorial decisions, recorded in "Notes on the Texts" at the end of the volume, appear sound and satisfying Several wrongs are put right here One, for example, is the claim that Beckett actually delivered "The Capital of the Ruins," an essay on the Irish Hospital at Saint Lo, as a radio address on Irish radio Gontarski found that there is no record of this in the radio's archive, and Beckett reported to him no recollection of it in 1983 The text itself is also emended from earlier inaccurate versions, as is the text of "neither," a short piece that previously appeared in corrupt form in several places These two textual interventions exemplify Gontarski's effort to correct mistakes reproduced, for instance, in Calder's 1990 volume, As the Story Was Told: Uncollected and Late Prose There are also some previously unpublished materials here (including Edith Fournier's translation of "L'Image") While this edition settles some matters, it unsettles others Beckett's death provides an arbitrary but nearly transparent logic for a discussion of the wholeness of his writing; this editorial effort uses the categories of "short prose" and, less visibly, "the author" to argue for something complete in Beckett's work Yet it does not include all of Beckett's short prose, and raises the question whether wholeness is the ruling criterion that scholarship often assumes it to be This edition collects work that Beckett published as short (mostly the work assembled in the Collected Shorter Prose, 1945-1980), rather than short work he published It does not make any effort to collect the nonfiction short prose--Beckett wrote a number of short essays and reviews--but uses the term to cover for the generic variance of Beckett's writing …