Short Fiction

Discussion of the concept of short story. Outline of the history of the short story, internationally and in Sweden. Especially short fiction by working-class authors is attended to. Comparative analysis of Lotta Lotass’ short fiction Redwood (2009), and a short story by Elf Norrbo (1908).

The short story, often regarded as a younger and perhaps inferior sister of the novel, " Chips from the Fiction Workshop " 1 , is genealogically its ancestor, for short stories in some form or the other – myths, fables, Biblical parables, fairy tales, etc. preceded the novel. The short story is an autonomous genre of literature, cultivated practically in all important countries of the world, with its varying sets of rules and experiments, a storehouse of a nation's evolving culture and social or individual concerns, though in numerous slices much shorter, but generally more palatable and hence more popular than the novel. The portrayal of Indian culture as manifested in one of its important regions is the avowed objective of the short stories of Basavaraj Naikar also, who clearly states in the Preface to his first and deservedly celebrated collection of short stories, The Thief of Nagarahalli and Other Stories 2 : The ten stories that I have selected here represent various aspects of human relationships in our life. They range from the elemental to the social to the mythical dimensions of life. He again points out in his Preface to his second collection, The Rani of Belavadi and Other Stories 3 : The themes range from the historical to the contemporary, from the religious to the secular, and from the elemental to the academic. The references to the " elemental " in both the extracts indicate that Naikar wants to penetrate deeper into the underlying human impulses that shape and govern human character, thus broadening out its range from the regional to the universal, nevertheless retaining the regional as its core. The life of the people of north Karnataka in its various facets remains his basic material for which these tales provide the background of a triple perspective of values – human, religious and metaphysical. First, The inspiration of courage, bravery, generosity, patriotism and peace is provided by 'The Rebellious Rani of Belavadi' (RRB, pp. 1-42) which narrates the events of the life of Rani Mallamma of the old kingdom of Belavadi, now reduced to a village, who fights with and ultimately humbles even the mighty Shivaji against heavy odds. Deeply religious and valiant in defending her kingdom, this woman is a role model in all walks of life even for the bravest of men – a character who can be applauded even by the so-called 'feminists' of today. The story 'The Golden Servant' (RRB pp. 152-95) is a compressed account of the long life of Kanakadasa 4 , which word has been literally translated into the title of the story. His gradual attainment of the status of a saint,

This paper presents an introductory note to Stefan Zweig’s work and it does so through the critical analysis of his short novel Buchmendel. In its story, some aspects related to the author’s life can be glimpsed —namely, his non-nationalist europeism. The depiction of its characters also highlights the central issue of Zweig’s novels and essays, that is, the focus on the life of the spirit and a serious warning about the social and personal risks of its absolutization.

Human life is finite, thus human being possess an innate obsession with the passage of time. Taxidermy, through its haunting presentation of dead/alive, inanimate/animate animal bodies, alters the way in which both human and nonhuman animals experience the passage of time. Taxidermic animals provide spectators with the illusion of suspended life and, more significantly, suspended death. This insight not only helps explain human fascination with taxidermy, but also elucidates the intersection of taxidermy, time, and death. Nineteenth-century French novelist Gustave Flaubert draws on this precise intersection in his 1857 short story “A Simple Heart” when detailing the life of the protagonist, a servant named Félicité. After forming numerous attachments only to outlive her human companions, Félicité preserves the physical form of her last and perhaps closest friend, a parrot called Loulou, when she has the bird stuffed. The stuffing of Loulou allows Félicité to believe that she seizes control of powerful forces, such as death, which, throughout the majority of her life, she faces as only a passive observer. Loulou’s presence in the story frequently plagues critics who struggle to understand why Flaubert concludes his narrative with the protagonist’s fixation on a taxidermic parrot. However, critics have yet to consider the full significance of Loulou’s role as a taxidermic animal. Taxidermic Loulou enables Félicité to imagine that she suspends death, helps readers of the story resolve issues with interpreting Loulou’s character, and introduces a new concept to studies in taxidermy: the ability of the taxidermic animal to suspend death.

This is an extended version (by approx 3000 words) of an essay which will be published in the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to the English Short Story. I respectfully ask that any references/citations be made to the published version when it appears.

A magazine that based itself on American's Esquire was a going concern in Australia in the 1930s. While the proliferation of so-called 'gentleman's magazines' represented a new trend in the interwar period, they have been critically dismissed because of their sexist content.  This article places this magazine within the context of ambitious cosmopolitan arty magazines such as Shadowlands and smart magazines such as Esquire, that mixed modernity with glamor and sexualized sophistication.  As such it draws attention to the magazine as an overlooked publisher of short fiction in Australia between the wars, a period traditionally considered in literary studies as Australia's dullest.

Book chapter.

Este trabajo se propone examinar una serie de vertientes relacionadas con la producción cuentística en la literatura peruana relacionadas con el género de terror fantástico. Como es bien sabido, el binomio cuento y terror es de honda raigambre; Edgard Allan Poe determinó, en su ensayo “Philosophy of Composition”(1846), las características más adecuadas para el cuento moderno defendiendo, en especial, la importancia de la unidad de efecto como la clave para alcanzar una intensidad que, para el relato fantástico en general, y para el de terror en concreto, será especialmente propicio de acuerdo a su naturaleza. Dentro de la tradición hispánica, el uruguayo Horacio Quiroga, así como Jorge Luis Borges, tanto en su obra como en sus reflexiones artísticas, participaron de este alegato en pro de las capacidades de condensación y de transmisión de emociones de los relatos breves. Y, de nuevo, en la literatura estadounidense, el célebre HP Lovecraft teorizó más específicamente sobre la evolución de lo sobrenatural en la literatura concediendo que el relato breve es la forma en la que más frecuentemente se ha refugiado la expresión del horror y lo sobrenatural. Es decir, podríamos afirmar que la expresión del terror fantástico tiene como su hábitat natural la narrativa de extensión breve. Asumiendo esta natural hermandad entre la literatura de terror y la forma narrativa del cuento, en este trabajo se acometerá, en sus distintas secciones, el repaso de una  serie  de  conceptos  imprescindibles  para  una  mejor  comprensión  de  los  distintos aspectos  tratados.

From India’s leading feminist press. Among 10 best in literary fiction, 2014 (Scroll.in)
Twelve short stories about everyday life and political realities that narrate how people, especially women, in a conflict zone cope with quotidian violence.

The Indian short story is not merely a derivative of the Western genre, but owes much to the great story-telling tradition of Indian antiquity. The mythical and legendary tales as well as folktales have provided a fertile soil for the modern Indian short story to germinate. Beginning towards the end of the nineteenth century, the Indian short story flourished in the twentieth century. It became evident by the end of the past century that the canon is attuned to Indian landscape whose heterogeneous people and their diverse experiences it reflects so faithfully. The Indian short story as a distinct genre resembles a “multicoloured glass” scattering myriad hues which is analogous to the diversity of our country itself. The variegated and unbeaten genre righteously deserves critical attention which it has been deprived of.

With twenty-seven scholarly articles by academics, professors and researchers, the present critical volume is a tribute to an affluent but neglected genre of Indian literature. In accord with the genre itself, the scope of the book allows for such diversity as the classic writers like Tagore and Manto; the feminist writers like Ismat Chughtai, Kamala Das, Shashi Deshpande and Indira Goswami; the dalit writers like Bama and Ajay Navaria; the diaspora writers like Bharati Mukherjee and Jhumpa Lahiri. The reworking of myth by Mahasweta Devi, the nature lore of Ruskin Bond, the saga of exile by the Kashmiri Pandits, the satire of Hari Shankar Parsai, the macabre tales of Satyajit Ray, the problematics of identity in Manoj Das and memory in Temsula Ao—all are taken into consideration within the structure of a single volume to make this a stimulating overview for students and scholars of Indian literature.

Among the galaxy of short story writers, Guy de Maupassant was the most versatile and brilliant, who enriched French literature between the year 1800 and 1900. His stories cover the panorama of French life at the end of the nineteenth century. In numerous of stories he demonstrates struggle of social classes. Such noteworthy stories are "The Necklace", "The Beggar", "A Piece of String", "Simon's Papa" and "Boule de Suif", in which we find the struggle of social classes. His works reflect his interest in the emotional problems of social classes. He deeply studied different aspects of life around him and reveals the same in his stories, which are characterized by his economy of style and minutely observation of the problems, the pain, the inconveniences and sufferings of the society.

The 2012 essay in Kerala Sahitya Akademi journal is on the contemporary aspects of short fiction in Malayalam by eminent and leading figures in fiction like Anand to young women writers of the genre. The political and poetic nuances of the art of short fiction are explicated ethically and critically to make sense of the genre and the contexts by selecting representative pieces from various popular periodicals in December 2011.

In the body of criticism around Don DeLillo's work, his short fiction has tended to be either overlooked or relegated to the category of precursor to the longer novels. This essay parts from the premise that the work DeLillo publishes in the short form deserves more focused critical attention, as its altered narrative mode opens up new avenues of expression which permit DeLillo to map out different approaches to the same broader issues his novels explore. The 1988 short story "The Ivory Acrobat," included in the 2011 collection The Angel Esmeralda, is a text which exemplifies this essential difference, broaching in advance even of its theorization the contemporary problem of compressed or accelerated space-time, an issue which is most often associated with DeLillo in the context of 2003's Cosmopolis. DeLillo's later emphasis on embodiment and the significance of place from The Body Artist to Zero K is here dealt with earlier and in a distinct way, depicting through a highly spatial representation an alternative response to the altered experience of time and space in the modern era, a response based in a reaffirmation of the body as the seat of being.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00111619.2019.1679081

The article analyzes the short stories of Basavaraj Naikar in terms of their typically Indian themes and Indian style of English language employed in them. This collection of stories was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Fiction prize for the First Book from Eurasia in 2000.

In 1968, Aamer Hussein met Qurratulain Hyder, the literary stalwart from the subcontinent who was also his mother’s friend. He was 13 at the time. This meeting with Hyder – Annie Khala to him – and her presence in his life, despite the miles separating them, would become one of the defining influences on Aamer Hussein’s life as a writer. He wrote about her ‘intellectual influence’ on him in his introduction to Fireflies in the Mist, 2008 (translated by her from her Urdu Aakhir-i-Shab ke Humsafar). A decade later, he writes, once again, about the relationship and her continuing influence on his writing and reading sensibilities: ‘Annie would guide my reading, criticizing one writer and praising another in a dialogue that continued from trip to trip,’ he writes in “Annie” from Hermitage, his most recent collection of short fiction, published in 2018 by Ushba Publishing International, a small independent press in Pakistan.

The volume includes 12 Stories, all of them new translations, a number of them never before published in English. This selection of Dagerman's stories is unified by a central theme: the death of innocence. Often narrated from the perspective of a child, the stories give voice to childhood's tender state of receptiveness and of joy tinged with longing.

In a strange house in a strange village during a strange time, Purnima Soren waits for her lover, Gopal Hansda, to return to her.
"Where is Gopal?" (short story)
First published in print in the Fiction Special of Mint Lounge; issue dated January 1, 2022.
May be read online, here: https://lifestyle.livemint.com/news/big-story/lounge-fiction-where-is-gopal-by-hansda-sowvendra-shekhar-111640929161676.html

This book traces the development of the modern short story in the hands of Irish women writers from the 1890s to the present. George Egerton, Somerville and Ross, Elizabeth Bowen, Mary Lavin, Edna O’Brien, Anne Enright and Claire Keegan are only some of the many Irish women writers who have made lasting contributions to the genre of the modern short story - yet their achievements have often been marginalized in literary histories, which typically define the Irish short story in terms of its oral heritage, nationalist concerns, rural realism and outsider-hero. Through a detailed investigation of the short fiction of fifteen prominent writers, this study aims to open up this critical conceptualization of the Irish short story to the formal properties and thematic concerns women writers bring to the genre. What stands out in thematic terms is an abiding interest in human relations, whether of love, the family or the larger community. In formal terms, this book traces the overall development of the Irish short story, highlighting both the lines of influence that connect these writers and the specific use each individual author makes of the short story form.

El aforismo contemporáneo concentra en poco espacio algunos de los grandes debates de la teoría literaria. Los límites genológicos han sido traspasados y fecundados por un nuevo concepto de frontera entendida como espacio de experimentación formal y estructural. Como bien puede comprobarse en los últimos creadores de aforismos, este tipo de textos oscila entre una visión clásica del aforismo y poéticas de la discontinuidad y de la fragmentación. Concretamente, en el presente artículo me centraré en la aforística de los mexicanos Eusebio Ruvalcaba y Armando González Torres, quienes, además de trascender el carácter cerrado de este género en sus libros, juegan con las posibilidades significativas de la macroestructura.

The contemporary aphorism concentrates some of the main challenges of literary theory. The genological boundaries have been crossed and defined by a new concept of border, understood as a space for formal and structural experimentations. As can be seen in the latest aphoristic writers, this type of texts oscillates between a classical vision of the aphorism and poetics of discontinuity and fragmentation. Specifically, I will focus on the aphoristic works of the Mexicans authors Eusebio Ruvalcaba and Armando González Torres; apart from transcending the closed character of this literary genre in their books, they play with the significant possibilities of the macrostructure.