A brief fictional prose narrative that is shorter than a novel and that
usually deals with only a few characters. The short story is usually
concerned with a single effect conveyed in only one or a few
significant episodes or scenes. The form encourages economy of
setting and concise narrative; character is disclosed in action and
dramatic encounter but is seldom fully developed.

Before the 19th century the short story was not generally regarded
as a distinct literary form. But although in this sense it may seem to
be a uniquely modern genre, the fact is that short prose fiction is
nearly as old as language itself. Throughout history man has enjoyed
various types of brief narratives: jests, anecdotes, studied
digressions, short allegorical romances, moralizing fairy tales, short
myths, and abbreviated historical legends. None of these constitutes
a short story as the 19th and 20th centuries have defined the term,
but they do make up a large part of the milieu from which the
modern short story emerged. (See literature.)

The short stories of particular literary cultures, along with other
genres, are discussed in articles such as Western literature; and in
articles on the arts of various peoples--e.g., South Asian arts.

Analysis of the genre:

As a genre, the short story has received relatively little critical
attention, and the most valuable studies of the form that exist are
often limited by region or era (e.g., Ray B. West's The Short Story
in America, 1900-50). One recent attempt to account for the genre
has been offered by the Irish short story writer Frank O'Connor,
who suggests that stories are a means for "submerged population
groups" to address a dominating community. Most other theoretical
discussions, however, are predicated in one way or another on
Edgar Allan Poe's thesis that stories must have a compact, unified
effect.

By far the majority of criticism on the short story focusses on
techniques of writing. Many, and often the best of the technical
works, advise the young reader--alerting him to the variety of
devices and tactics employed by the skilled writer. On the other
hand, many of these works are no more than treatises on "how to
write stories" for the young writer, and not serious critical material.
(See literary criticism.)

The prevalence in the 19th century of two words, "sketch" and
"tale," affords one way of looking at the genre. In the United States
alone there were virtually hundreds of books claiming to be
collections of sketches (Washington Irving's Sketch Book, William
Dean Howells' Suburban Sketches) or collections of tales (Poe's
Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, Herman Melville's Piazza
Tales). These two terms establish the polarities of the milieu out of
which the modern short story grew. (See literary sketch.)

The tale is much older than the sketch. Basically, the tale is a
manifestation of a culture's unaging desire to name and conceptualize
its place in the cosmos. It provides a culture's narrative framework
for such things as its vision of itself and its homeland or for
expressing its conception of its ancestors and its gods. Usually filled
with cryptic and uniquely deployed motifs, personages, and
symbols, tales are frequently fully understood only by members of
the particular culture to which they belong. Simply, tales are
intracultural. Seldom created to address an outside culture, a tale is
a medium through which a culture speaks to itself and thus
perpetuates its own values and stabilizes its own identity. The old
speak to the young through tales. (See folk tale, symbolism.)

The sketch, by contrast, is intercultural, depicting some phenomenon
of one culture for the benefit or pleasure of a second culture. Factual
and journalistic, in essence the sketch is generally more analytic or
descriptive and less narrative or dramatic than the tale. Moreover,
the sketch by nature is suggestive, incomplete; the tale is often
hyperbolic, overstated.

The primary mode of the sketch is written; that of the tale, spoken.
This difference alone accounts for their strikingly different effects.
The sketch writer can have, or pretend to have, his eye on his
subject. The tale, recounted at court or campfire--or at some place
similarly removed in time from the event--is nearly always a
recreation of the past. The tale-teller is an agent of time, bringing
together a culture's past and its present. The sketch writer is more
an agent of space, bringing an aspect of one culture to the attention
of a second.

It is only a slight oversimplification to suggest that the tale was the
only kind of short fiction until the 16th century, when a rising middle
class interest in social realism on the one hand and in exotic lands on
the other put a premium on sketches of subcultures and foreign
regions. In the 19th century certain writers--those one might call the
"fathers" of the modern story: Nikolay Gogol, Hawthorne, E.T.A.
Hoffmann, Heinrich von Kleist, Prosper Mérimée, Poe--combined
elements of the tale with elements of the sketch. Each writer worked
in his own way, but the general effect was to mitigate some of the
fantasy and stultifying conventionality of the tale and, at the same
time, to liberate the sketch from its bondage to strict factuality. The
modern short story, then, ranges between the highly imaginative
tale and the photographic sketch and in some ways draws on both.

The short stories of Ernest Hemingway, for example, may often
gain their force from an exploitation of traditional mythic symbols
(water, fish, groin wounds), but they are more closely related to the
sketch than to the tale. Indeed, Hemingway was able at times to
submit his apparently factual stories as newspaper copy. In contrast,
the stories of Hemingway's contemporary William Faulkner more
closely resemble the tale. Faulkner seldom seems to understate, and
his stories carry a heavy flavour of the past. Both his language and
his subject matter are rich in traditional material. A Southerner might
well suspect that only a reader steeped in sympathetic knowledge of
the traditional South could fully understand Faulkner. Faulkner may
seem, at times, to be a Southerner speaking to and for Southerners.
But, as, by virtue of their imaginative and symbolic qualities,
Hemingway's narratives are more than journalistic sketches, so, by
virtue of their explorative and analytic qualities, Faulkner's narratives
are more than Southern tales.

Whether or not one sees the modern short story as a fusion of
sketch and tale, it is hardly disputable that today the short story is a
distinct and autonomous, though still developing, genre.
 

For more, and if you have a MVNU student ID

Just one other point.  In MLA works cited lists the short story title has quote marks ("") placed around it in contrast to a novel's title, which is underlined.

Last Updated

Jan. 21, 2003

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