SHORT STORY: A GENRE WITH A DIFFERENCE

Mamta

Associate Prof. and Head

PG Dept. of English

A STORY AND A NOVEL

• Short story, brief fictional prose narrative that is shorter than a novel and that usually deals with only a few characters.
• It deals with a situation, sometimes only with a character

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AS A GENRE

• The short story as a genre is considered very limited in scope due to its brevity, though the same feature lends it charming effectiveness
• Like a literary fragment, the short story tends to play with the reader’s expectations by leaving ideas, incidents, and characters open-ended and thus open to various interpretations.
• Short story resists any absolute definition. It, indeed, takes delight in its incompleteness.

A SINGLE EFFECT

• 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, concise narrative, and the omission of a complex plot; character is disclosed in action and dramatic encounter but is seldom fully developed. Despite its relatively limited scope, though, a short story is often judged by its ability to provide a “complete” or satisfying treatment of its characters and subject.

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 humankind 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 it has been defined since the 19th century, but they do make up a large part of the milieu from which the modern short story emerged.

VARIOUS SCOPES OF THE SHORT STORY

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• Ever since human civilization dawned, the short story has flourished as an essential and engaging social practice.
• The earliest stories trace human beings’ gradual emergence from their primitive status. These stories have helped to create history and identity for people..
• All societies have had their myths and legends and their particular narratives of how the universe came into being, how human beings evolved, how various tribes emerged and survived the lashes of time, and how their heroes fought.
• Epics worldwide are the flowing rivers of hundreds of currents of short stories, stretching across centuries, cultures, and countrie.
• Various aspects of humanity, human relationships, human weaknesses and strengths make the theme of these short stories.
• The values, ideals, culture, knowledge, and wisdom were preserved and transmitted to future generations through the genre of short story.
• As a form, the short story has arrived at its present form through various developmental and experimental stages.

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GROWTH OF THE GENRE

• The short story has grown as a genre in world literature in modern times because of its peculiar characteristics
• In terms of the literary output in this form, America leads the way, followed by France and Russia.
• With the growth of the rising middle class, there was an unexpected rise in the reading public, which boosted the tremendous growth of magazines and periodicals during the 1930s.
• Thus, short stories became the unanimous choice of the reading fraternity. 

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THE MODERN SHORT STORY

•  The modern short story, then, ranges between the highly imaginative tale and the photographic sketch and in some ways draws on both.
• Among the European countries, France was the country that first acknowledged the short story as a literary genre and produced some great literature through this literary genre. Honore Balzac (1799-1850) and Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893) were the most revered and acknowledged French short story writers. On the other hand, Gogol and Turgenev took Russian short story writing to new heights through their significant contribution.

A BRIEF HISTORY

• The earliest tales from India are not as old as those from Egypt and the Middle East. The Brahmanas (c. 900–700 BCE) function mostly as theological appendixes to the Vedas, but a few are composed as short instructional parables. Perhaps more interesting as stories are the later tales in the Pali Language, the Jatakas. Although these tales have a religious frame that attempts to recast them as Buddhist ethical teachings, their actual concern is generally with secular behaviour and practical wisdom. Another, nearly contemporary collection of Indian tales, the Panchtantra (c. 100 BCE–500 CE), has been one of the world’s most-popular books. This anthology of amusing and moralistic animal tales, akin to those of “Aesop” in Greece, was translated into Middle Persian in the 6th century; into Arabic in the 8th century; and into Hebrew, Greek, and Latin soon thereafter. 

• The congenial academic and socio-cultural conditions provided short stories with the fertile ground to germinate and blossom into a full-fledged literary genre in the hands of geniuses like Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry James in America.
• In England, writers like Dickens and Hardy experimented with this literary form
• In very modern form the short story continues to flourish and evolve in ever new forms