This wide-ranging introduction to the short story tradition in the United States of America traces the genre from its beginnings in the early 19th century topresent day. The major writers in the genre are covered in depth with a general view of their work and detailed discussion of a number of examples of individual stories. The Cambridge Introduction to the American Short Story offers a comprehensive and accessible guide to this rich literary tradition. It will be invaluable to students and readers looking for critical approaches to the short story and wishing to deepen their understanding of how authors have approached and developed this fascinating and challenging genre.
Contents:
1. Introduction
2. The short story as ironic myth: Washington Irving and William Austin
3. Nathaniel Hawthorne
4. Edgar Allan Poe
5. Herman Melville
6. New territories: Bret Harte and Mark Twain
7. Realism, the grotesque and impressionism: Hamlin Garland, Ambrose Bierce and Stephen Crane
8. Henry James
9. Rebecca Harding Davis, Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman
10. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kate Chopin, Willa Cather and Edith Wharton
11. Growth, fragmentation, new aesthetics and new voices in the early twentieth century
12. O.Henry and Jack London
13. Sherwood Anderson
14. Ernest Hemingway
15. F. Scott Fitzgerald
16. William Faulkner
17. Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor
18. Charles Chesnutt, Richard Wright, James Baldwin and the African American short story to 1965
19. Aspects of the American short story 1930–1980
20. Two traditions and the changing idea of the mainstream
21. The postmodern short story in America
22. Raymond Carver
23. Epilogue: the contemporary American short story; Guide to further reading
