The Short Story: A Critical Introduction

by Valerie Shaw

Throughout this text, Valerie Shaw addresses two key questions: 'What are the special satisfactions afforded by reading short stories?' and 'How are these satisfactions derived from each story's literary techniques and narrative strategies?'. She then attempts to answer these questions by drawing on stories from different periods and countries - by authors who were also great novelists, like Henry James, Flaubert, Kafka and D.H. Lawrence; by authors who specifically dedicated themselves to the art of the short story, like Kipling, Chekhov and Katherine Mansfield; by contemporary practitioners like Angela Carter and Jorge Luis Borges; and by unfairly neglected writers like Sarah Orne Jewett and Joel Chandler Harris.

Genres: Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, Short Stories

Paperback

First published January 1, 1983

Reviews

[Steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unlike the books on short story theory by Charles May and Susan Lohafer, which are anthologies of essays primarily by other writers, Shaw's book is an extended analysis of the short story form, roughly from the early 1800s (Poe, Hawthorne, Irving) through Modernism (Woolf, Hemingway) and culminating with Borges. This is not a history of the form, hence not exhaustive in the writers she studies, but more a survey of the goals and techniques as the form came into its own, matured. It's the story of how the short story got to where it is today (or at least where it was when this book was written in 1983). Shaw does a deep dive on narration ("artful" and "artless"), characters, place, community, and subject matter by looking at representative writers, before concluding with a final chapter on "the splintering frame," which, from our vantage of hindsight, we might classify as the chaos of the form as modernism gave way to postmodernism. The main value here is that before you can make it new you need to know what came before, and Shaw shows what the early practitioners of the form were experimenting with in their time(s). In addition to close analysis of stories, Shaw also delves into essays and letters, where these early short-storywriters (Poe, Stevenson, James, Chekov, Mansfield, Woolf, Bowen, Kafka, O'Connor, etc.) worked out the theoretical underpinnings of the form. I'd read this before, and reading it again now, think it is still a useful resource for storywriters if only to avoid "reinventing the wheel."

[Salli · Rating 4 out of 5]

A critical review of the short story over time from its origins to the almost modern day, though ordered by different themes such as places or characters.
It seems each era has its different use for the short story and different expectations. I imagine that today almost anything goes.
I found the book opened up the possibilities of the short story for me. One thought is that the short story is in relation to the novel as the theatre is to film, a place where more can be done, tried, invented than in the novel with its greater need for linear plot and causal incidents.
I suspect I would have had a richer experience of the book if I had read the stories discussed before hand