Short story

Information about Short story

The short story is a literary genre. It is usually fictional narrative prose and tends to be more concise and to the point than longer works of fiction, such as novellas (in the modern sense of this term) and novels.

Short stories have their origins in oral story-telling traditions and the prose anecdote, a swiftly-sketched situation that comes rapidly to its point. With the rise of the comparatively realistic novel, the short story evolved as a miniature, with some of its first perfectly independent examples in the tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann and Anton Chekhov.

Many authors today release compilations of their short stories in short story collections.

History

Origins

Short stories date back to the oral story-telling traditions which originally produced epics such as the Iliad and Odyssey by Homer. Oral narratives were often told in the form of rhyming or rhythmic poetry, often including recurring sections or, in the case of Homer, Homeric epithets. Such stylistic effects often acted as mnemonic means for easier recall, rendition and adaptation of the story. Short sections of such poems might focus on individual narratives that could be told at one sitting. The overall arc of the story would only emerge through the telling of multiple sections of the tale.

Fables, which tend to be folk tales with an explicitly expressed moral, were said by the Greek historian Herodotus to have been invented by a Greek slave named Aesop in the 6th century BCE (although other times and nationalities are also given for Aesop). These ancient fables are known today as Aesop's Fables.

The other ancient form of short story, anecdotes, was popular during the years of the Roman Empire. Anecdotes functioned as a sort of parable, a brief realistic narration that embodies a point. Many of the surviving Roman anecdotes were later collected in the Gesta Romanorum in the 13th or 14th century. Anecdotes remained popular in Europe well into the 18th century, when the fictional anecdotal letters of Sir Roger de Coverley were published.

In Europe, the oral story-telling tradition began to develop into written stories in the early 14th century, most notably with Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron. Both of these books are composed of individual short stories (which range from farce or humorous anecdotes to well-crafted literary fictions) set within a larger narrative story (a frame story), although the frame tale device was not adopted by all writers. At the end of the 16th century, some of the most popular short stories in Europe were the darkly tragic "novella" of Matteo Bandello (especially in their French translation). During the Renaissance, the term novella was used when referring to short stories.

The mid 17th century in France saw the development of a refined short novel, the "nouvelle", by such authors as Madame de Lafayette. In the 1690s, traditional fairy tales began to be published (one of the most famous collections was by Charles Perrault). The appearance of Antoine Galland's first modern translation of the Thousand and One Nights (or Arabian Nights) (from 1704; another translation appeared in 1710–12) would have an enormous influence on the 18th century European short stories of Voltaire, Diderot and others.

Modern short stories

Modern short stories emerged as their own genre in the early 19th century. Early examples of short stories include the Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales (1824–1826) or Nikolai Gogol's Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka (1831-1832). Charles Brockden Brown's "Somnambulism" (1805), Washington Irving's Rip van Winkle (1819) and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820), Edgar Allan Poe's Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840) and Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales (1842) are the first examples in the USA.

In the later part of the 19th century, the growth of print magazines and journals created a strong market demand for short fiction between 3,000 and 15,000 words in length. Among the famous short stories to come out of this time period was "Ward No. 6" by Anton Chekhov.

At the same time first literary theories about the short story appeared. The first widely known theory is Edgar Allan Poe's "The Philosophy of Composition" (1846). In 1901 Brander Matthews, first US-American professor of dramatic literature published his "The Philosophy of the Short-Story."

In the first half of the 20th century, a number of high-profile magazines, such as The Atlantic Monthly, Scribner's, and The Saturday Evening Post, all published short stories in each issue. The demand for quality short stories was so great, and the money paid for them so high, that F. Scott Fitzgerald repeatedly turned to short story writing to pay off his numerous debts.

The demand for short stories by print magazines hit its peak in the middle of the 20th century, when in 1952 Life magazine published Ernest Hemingway's long short story (or novella) The Old Man and the Sea. The issue containing this story sold 5,300,000 copies in only two days.

Since then, the number of commercial magazines that publish short stories has declined, even though several well-known magazines like The New Yorker continue to feature them. Literary magazines also provide a showcase for short stories. In addition, short stories have recently found a new life online, where they can be found in online magazines, in collections organized by author or theme, and on blogs.

Elements and characteristics

Short stories tend to be less complex than novels. Usually, a short story will focus on only one incident, has a single plot, a single setting, a limited number of characters, and covers a short period of time.

In longer forms of fiction, stories tend to contain certain core elements of dramatic structure: exposition (the introduction of setting, situation and main characters); complication (the event of the story that introduces the conflict); rising action, crisis (the decisive moment for the protagonist and their commitment to a course of action); climax (the point of highest interest in terms of the conflict and the point of the story with the most action); resolution (the point of the story when the conflict is resolved); and moral.

Because of their short length, short stories may or may not follow this pattern. Some do not follow patterns at all. For example, modern short stories only occasionally have an exposition. More typical, though, is an abrupt beginning, with the story starting in the middle of the action. As with longer stories, plots of short stories also have a climax, crisis, or turning-point. However, the endings of many short stories are abrupt and open and may or may not have a moral or practical lesson.

Of course, as with any art form, the exact characteristics of a short story will vary by author.

Length

Determining what exactly separates a short story from longer fictional formats is problematic. A classic definition of a short story is that one should be able to be read it in one sitting, a point most notably made in Edgar Allan Poe's essay "The Philosophy of Composition" (1846). Other definitions place the maximum word length at 7,500 words. In contemporary usage, the term short story most often refers to a work of fiction no longer than 20,000 words and no shorter than 1,000.

A short story is a form of short fictional narrative prose. Short stories tend to be more concise and to the point than longer works of fiction, such as novellas (in the modern sense of this term) and novels. Because of their brevity, successful short stories rely on literary devices such as character, plot, theme, language, and insight to a greater extent than long form fiction.

Short stories have their origins in the prose anecdote, a swiftly-sketched situation that comes rapidly to its point, with parallels in oral story-telling traditions. With the rise of the comparatively realistic novel, the short story evolved as a miniature, with some of its first perfectly independent examples in the tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann and Edgar Allan Poe.

A selection of famous short stories

References

See also

External links

For the gay men's lifestyle magazine, see Genre (magazine).
A genre [ˈʒã:rə], (French: "kind" or "sort" from Greek: γένος (genos)) is a loose set of criteria for
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Fiction is the telling of stories which are not entirely based upon facts. More specifically, fiction is an imaginative form of narrative, one of the four basic rhetorical modes.
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A narrative is a concept, composed and delivered in any medium, which describes a sequence of real or unreal events. It derives from the Latin verb narrare, which means "to recount" and is related to the adjective gnarus, meaning "knowing" or "skilled".
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Prose is writing distinguished from poetry by its greater variety of rhythm and its closer resemblance to the patterns of everyday speech. The word prose comes from the Latin prosa, meaning straightforward, hence the term "prosaic," which is often seen as pejorative.
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A novella is a narrative work of prose fiction longer than a short story but shorter than a novel. While there is some disagreement of what length defines a novella, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Nebula Awards for science fiction define the novella as having a
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novel (from, Italian novella, Spanish novela, French nouvelle for "new", "news", or "short story of something new") is today a long prose narrative set out in writing.
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anecdote is a short tale narrating an interesting or amusing biographical incident. It may be as brief as the setting and provocation of a bon mot. An anecdote is always based on real life, an incident involving actual persons, whether famous or not, in real places.
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Realism in the visual arts and literature is the depiction of subjects as they appear in everyday life, without embellishment or interpretation. The term is also used to describe works of art which, in revealing a truth, may emphasize the ugly or sordid.
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Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann

Pseudonym: E. T. A(madeus) Hoffmann
Born: 24 January 1776(1776--)
Königsberg, East Prussia
Died: 25 May 1822 (aged 46)
Berlin, Brandenburg, Prussia
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Антон Павлович Чехов Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

Anton Chekhov, by Osip Braz, 1898
Born: 29 January [O.S.
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iLiad is an electronic handheld device, or e-book device, which can be used for document reading and editing. Like the Sony Reader, the iLiad makes use of an electronic paper display.

Description

Main specifications:
  • an 8.1-inch (20.

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The Odyssey (Greek Οδύσσεια (Odússeia)) is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to the Ionian poet Homer. The poem is commonly dated circa 800 to circa 600 BC.
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Homer is the name given to the purported author of the early Greek poems the Iliad and the Odyssey. It is now generally believed that they were composed by illiterate aoidoi (rhapsodes) in an oral tradition in the 8th or 7th century BC.
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rhyme is a repetition of identical or similar sounds in two or more different words and is most often used in poetry. The word "rhyme" may also refer to a short poem, such as a rhyming couplet or other brief rhyming poem such as nursery rhymes.
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Not to be confused with pneumonic.


A mnemonic (pronounced IPA: /niːˈmɒnɪk/ in RP, /nɨˈmɑnɨk/
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fable is a brief, succinct story, in prose or verse, that features animals, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature which are anthropomorphized (given human qualities), and that illustrates a moral lesson (a "moral"), which may at the end be expressed explicitly in a pithy
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Folklore is the body of expressive culture, including tales, music, dance, legends, oral history, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs, customs, and so forth within a particular population comprising the traditions (including oral traditions) of that culture, subculture, or group.
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Herodotus of Halicarnassus (Greek: Ἡρόδοτος Ἁλικαρνᾱσσεύς Hērodotos Halikarnāsseus
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Aesop (also spelled Æsop, from the Greek Αἴσωπος—Aisōpos), known only for the genre of fables ascribed to him, was by tradition a slave (
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Aesop's Fables or Aesopica refers to a collection of fables credited to Aesop (620–560 BC), a slave and story-teller who lived in Ancient Greece. Aesop's Fables have become a blanket term for collections of brief fables, usually involving personified animals.
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The Roman Empire is the name given to both the imperial domain developed by the city-state of Rome and also the corresponding phase of that civilization, characterized by an autocratic form of government. This article however is about the latter.
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For a comparison of parable with other kinds of stories, see .
A parable is a brief, succinct story, in prose or verse, that illustrates a moral or religious lesson.
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Gesta Romanorum, a Latin collection of anecdotes and tales, was probably compiled about the end of the 13th century or the beginning of the 14th. It still possesses a two-fold literary interest, first as one of the most popular books of the time, and secondly as the source,
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The Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories written by Geoffrey Chaucer in the 14th century (two of them in prose, the rest in verse). The tales, some of which are originals and others not, are contained inside a frame tale and told by a collection of pilgrims on a
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Giovanni Boccaccio

Born: 1313
Tuscany
Died: 1375
Certaldo
Occupation: Renaissance humanist
Nationality: Italian
Writing period: Early Renaissance

Giovanni Boccaccio
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The Decameron (subtitle: Prencipe Galeotto) is a collection of 100 novellas by Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio, probably begun in 1350 and finished in 1353.
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A frame story (also frame tale, frame narrative, etc.) is a narrative technique whereby a main story is composed, at least in part, for the purpose of organizing a set of shorter stories, each of which is a story within a story—or for surrounding a single story
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Matteo Bandello (c. 1480 – 1562) was an Italian novelist.

Biography

Matteo Bandello was born at Castelnuovo Scrivia, near Tortona (current Piedmont), about the year 1480 or 1485.
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Madame de La Fayette (baptized March 18, 1634 - May 25, 1693) was a French writer, the author of La Princesse de Clèves, France's first historical novel and one of the earliest novels in literature.
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