Modern American Short Story Sequences: Composite Fictions and Fictive Communities

by J. Gerald Kennedy (Editor)

This book gathers together eleven essays on important American short story sequences of the twentieth century. The introduction elucidates problems of defining the genre, cites notable instances of the form, and explores the implications of its modern emergence and popularity. Subsequent essays discuss illustrative works by such figures as Henry James, Jean Toomer, Ernest Hemingway, Richard Wright, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, J.D. Salinger, John Cheever, John Updike, Louise Erdrich, and Raymond Carver. Each essay also considers implications of form and arrangement in the construction of composite fictions that often produce the illusion of a fictive community.

240 pages, Hardcover

First published January 27, 1995

About the author

J. Gerald Kennedy is Boyd Professor of English at Louisiana State University. He is the author of Imagining Paris: Exile, Writing, and American Identity and coeditor (with Jackson R. Bryer) of French Connections: Hemingway and Fitzgerald Abroad. He was advisory editor of volumes 1–3 of the Letters of Ernest Hemingway, under the general editorship of Sandra Spanier, and he is coediting a forthcoming volume of Hemingway letters, the final years. He is also the author of a number of essays on Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and expatriate Paris, and he edited Modern American Short Story Sequences: Composite Fictions and Fictive Communities. His publications on nineteenth-century American literature include Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing and (with fellowship support from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the NEH) a wide-ranging cultural history, Strange Nation: Literary Nationalism and Cultural Conflict in the Age of Poe.