The Cambridge History of the English Short Story

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

Dominic Head (Edited by)

9781107167421, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 14 November 2016

668 pages
23.5 x 16 x 4 cm, 1.06 kg

'… 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

The Cambridge History of the English Short Story is the first comprehensive volume to capture the literary history of the English short story. Charting the origins and generic evolution of the English short story to the present day, and written by international experts in the field, this book covers numerous transnational and historical connections between writers, modes and forms of transmission. Suitable for English literature students and scholars of the English short story generally, it will become a standard work of reference in its field.

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.

Subject Areas: Reference works [GBC], Literary reference works [DSR], Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: general [DSB]