The Culture And Commerce Of The American Short Story

The Culture and Commerce of the Short Story is a cultural and historical account of the birth and development of the American short story from the time of Poe. It describes how America - through political movements, changes in education, magazine editorial policy and the work of certain individuals - built the short story as an image of itself and continues to use the genre as a locale within the realm of art where American political ideals can be rehearsed, debated and turned into literary forms. While the focus of this book is cultural, individual authors such as Edgar Allan Poe and Edith Wharton are examined as representative of the phenomenon. As part of its project, this book also contains a history of creative writing and the workshop dating back a century. Andrew Levy makes a strong case for the centrality of the short story as a form of art in American life and provides an explanation for the genre's resurgence and ongoing success.

This collection explores the history and development of the anglophone short story since the beginning of the nineteenth century.

The short story was a commercial phenomenon which took off in the late nineteenth century and lasted through to the rise of television and film. Baldwin uses a wide variety of sources to show how economic factors helped to dictate how and what a wide variety of authors wrote.

Comprising new work by leading scholars, this book traces the history of American short fiction and provides original avenues for research.

The American short story has always been characterized by exciting aesthetic innovations and an immense range of topics. This handbook offers students and researchers a comprehensive introduction to the multifaceted genre with a special focus on recent developments due to the rise of new media. Part I provides systematic overviews of significant contexts ranging from historical-political backgrounds, short story theories developed by writers, print and digital culture, to current theoretical approaches and canon formation. Part II consists of 35 paired readings of representative short stories by eminent authors, charting major steps in the evolution of the American short story from its beginnings as an art form in the early nineteenth century up to the digital age. The handbook examines historically, methodologically, and theoretically the coming together of the enduring narrative practice of compression and concision in American literature. It offers fresh and original readings relevant to studying the American short story and shows how the genre performs American culture.

This is a concise yet comprehensive treatment of the American short story that includes an historical overview of the topic as well as discussion of notable American authors and individual stories, from Benjamin Franklin’s “The Speech of Miss Polly Baker” in 1747 to “The Joy Luck Club”. Includes a selection of writers chosen not only for their contributions of individual stories but for bodies of work that advanced the boundaries of short fiction, including Washington Irving, Sarah Orne Jewett, Stephen Crane, Jamaica Kincaid, and Tim O’Brien Addresses the ways in which American oral storytelling and other narrative traditions were integral to the formation and flourishing of the short story genre Written in accessible and engaging prose for students at all levels by a renowned literary scholar to illuminate an important genre that has received short shrift in scholarly literature of the last century Includes a glossary defining the most common terms used in literary history and in critical discussions of fiction, and a bibliography of works for further study

Predicated upon the principles of political freedom, cultural openness, religious tolerance, individual self-reliance, and ethnic diversity, the United States of America has been tempted recurrently by the lures of the secret. American Secrets explores this political, historical, and cultural phenomenon from many, often surprisingly, overlapping angles in these analyses of the literary and cultural uses and abuses of secrecy within a democratic culture. Through analyses of diverse literary works andcultural manifestations-from Mark Twain's anti-imperialist prophecies to 9/11 conspiracy theories, from the traumas of the Vietnam war to the homophobia of the American military establishment, from the unresolved dilemmas of nuclear politics to the secret ecologies shunted aside by the exploitation of the environment, from the questionings of national identity on the ethnic and (trans)sexual margins to the confessional modes of poetry and the poetics of the unspeakable and unrepresentable-these essays reveal the politics within the poetics and, indissociably, the poetics fueling the politics of secrecy in its ambivalent deployment. Secrecy often seems to be a question without an answer or an answer that either seems to beg the question or to be a question itself. These essays address this paradox with their own questioning explorations. In answering such questions, the volume as a whole provides an illuminating overview of the pervasiveness of the secret and its modalities in American culture while alsodealing specifically with the poetics of the secret in its various, historically recurrent literary manifestations.