Time and the Short Story

The short story as an autonomous genre has called the attention of both writers and literary critics with theoretical concerns over the last two centuries. It is a form of writing that has met the favour of readers and publishers alike: because of its very brevity, it can be consumed in a short time, and so come up to a reader's need of either escapist or serious literature; it can be practiced, like the novel, according to different narrative modalities: from popular genres, which satisfy the demands of the literary market, to experimental writing. Finally, as a self-contained form, it works well at a didactic level; in British and American universities, for instance, short stories are generally studied in Creative Writing courses. The essays included in the present volume deal with short stories belonging to various literatures in English (and not only), and focus on time, which is looked at from different angles: as the theme, or motif, of a text; as a narrative structure which can be approached in narratological terms, with neat distinctions between the time of story and the time of discourse, between writing time and reading time; as history, merging into memory and myth.

Autorentext

Maria Teresa Chialant is Professor of English Literature at the University of Salerno (Italy). Her main fields of research are the Victorian novel and Gender Studies. She has written extensively on Dickens, Gissing and H. G. Wells, and also published on twentieth-century authors, such as Conrad, Rebecca West and Eva Figes. Marina Lops is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Salerno (Italy). Her research interests include Modernism and Gender Studies. She is the editor of volumes on Dora Marsden and Arthur Symons, and has published on Mansfield, Woolf and Conrad.

Inhalt

Contents: Maria Teresa Chialant/Marina Lops: Introduction - Vittoria Intonti: The Representation of Time in the Short Story: The Example of Henry James - Annamaria Sportelli: The Short Story: The Form in Time - Laurel Brake: Fiction in the Late Nineteenth Century: Serials, Serialisation, and the Short Story - Marina Lops: The Short Story in the 'Naughty Nineties': The Case of George Egerton - Flora de Giovanni: 'An Event in the Lives of the Living': Time and Death in the Modernist Short Story - Clotilde Bertoni: Faits divers: Crime and Short Fiction - Angelo Righetti: Time in Some Aussie and Kiwi Short Stories: Lawson, Baynton, Palmer, and Sargeson - Rossella Ciocca: Desperate Humanism: Saadat Hasan Manto's Short Stories and Sketches about Partition - Biancamaria Rizzardi: Myth and the Ambiguity of Time in Canadian Short Fiction: Sheila Watson's 'Antigone' - A. Lâmia Gülçur: Horses, History and Time in Sherman Alexie's The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist ght in Heaven: Tales of Simultaneity - Elio Di Piazza: Rudyard Kipling's Imperial Chronology in 'The Lost Legion' - Mariateresa Franza: A 'Single Sitting' Story: H. G. Wells's 'The New Accelerator' - Maria Teresa Chialant: Time Matters: Joseph Conrad's 'To-morrow' - Antonella Piazza/Marcella Soldaini: Siblings and Time in Four Short Stories: From Victorianism to Modernism - Eleonora Rao: The Stranger's Time is a Moving Train, a Plane in Flight: Alice Munro's étranger - Allan Weiss: Future Vision: Time and Perspective in Margaret Atwood's Speculative-Fiction Short Stories.