Overview

This Companion offers students and scholars a comprehensive introduction to the development and the diversity of the American short story as a literary form from its origins in the eighteenth century to the present day. Rather than define what the short story is as a genre, or defend its importance in comparison with the novel, this Companion seeks to understand what the short story does – how it moves through national space, how it is always related to other genres and media, and how its inherent mobility responds to the literary marketplace and resonates with key critical themes in contemporary literary studies. The chapters offer authoritative introductions and reinterpretations of a literary form that has re-emerged as a major force in the twenty-first-century public sphere dominated by the Internet.

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9781009292818

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'... reminds the reader why a century of short story writing has shaped American literature from Edgar Allen Poe to Teju Cole. ... Highly recommended.' K. Gale, Choice

Author Information

Michael J. Collins is Senior Lecturer in 20th Century American Literature and Culture at King's College London where he teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, life writing, and music. He is the author of The Drama of the American Short Story, 1800–1865 (Michigan, 2016) and Exoteric Modernisms: Progressive Era Literature and the Aesthetics of Everyday Life (Edinburgh, forthcoming). Gavin Jones is the Frederick P. Rehmus Family Professor of the Humanities at Stanford University, where he has taught American literature since 1999. He is the author of four monographs, most recently Failure and the American Writer: A Literary History (Cambridge, 2014), and Reclaiming John Steinbeck: Writing for the Future of Humanity (Cambridge, 2021).

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