Roger D. Jones
English 3321, Short Story
Period Sheet
I. 1800-1870: Origins of the Short Story; Romanticism and Transcendentalism
A. Major Writers:
Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Gogol, W. Irving
B. Emphases:
- Thematic: nature, the supernatural, the "Gothic", local color, the tale
- Technical: the "single effect" (Poe); the "romance"; local color and region (Irving); morals and manners; symbolism (Gogol, Hawthorne, Melville)
II. 1870-1914: Realism, Naturalism, and Modernism
A. Major Writers:
Chekhov, Tolstoy, Turgenev, James, Faulkner, Joyce, Crane, Conrad, Bierce, Kafka, Twain, Chopin, Cather
B. Emphases:
- Thematic: the changing world/threat of industrialization; the clash of cultures; implications of Darwin; indifference of the universe; death; the sick psyche
- Technical: Realism; the unreliable narrator; stream-of-consciousness; fragmentation and spatial arrangment; multiple perspectives; broken chronology; pessimism; absurdism (Kafka)
III. 1914-1950: Late Modernism
A. Major Writers:
Forster, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Mansfield, Porter, Hemingway, Lawrence,Fitzgerald, S. Anderson
B. Emphases:
- Thematic: the changing world; world wars I and II; ethnicity; the modern world and fragmentation of the psyche; business, wealth, and poverty; the decline of Christianity; existentialism; absurdism
- Technical: compression; fragmentation; continuation of modernism techniques; also, return to traditional story-telling
IV. 1950-present: Contemporary and Postmodernism
A. Major Writers:
Frank O'Connor, Flannery O'Connor, Hemingway, Updike, Cheever, Lessing, Jackson, Marquez, Shaw, Singer, Beattie, Barthelme, Carver, Baldwin, Walker, Fuentes, Munro, many others.
B. Emphases:
- Thematic: world war; civil rights and ethnicity; nuclear tensions; conformity; social injustice; individual alienation; sexuality and gender; absurdism; the threat of the state; personal relationships; values.
- Technical: "magical realism" (Marquez); the "grotesque"( Fl. O'Connor); absurdism; metafiction; mixtures of styles; the "short short" story
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