Description: The United States developed its characteristic versions and voices within the short story genre. Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, and Henry James each had vastly different ideas on what constituted a “short story,” a “tale” or even a “long story.” Women writers, among them Sarah Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin, and Willa Cather, pioneered new ways of writing stories with women’s concerns. Ernest Hemingway and others radically revised what a story could do. After World War II, realists and minimalists vied for attention and pushed the short story into new directions. Today, the story has become a major vehicle of expression for immigrants, marginal groups, and new authors breaking into print for the first time. We will study sample texts from the different periods of the story’s development as well as major theoretical statements about the form of the short story in North America.
- Teacher: Thomas Austenfeld