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- Volume 12, Issue 1, 2022
Short Fiction in Theory & Practice - The Health of the Short Story: Part 1, Apr 2022
The Health of the Short Story: Part 1, Apr 2022
- Editorial
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Contagious symptoms: The need to tell stories and the health of the form
More LessLucy Dawes Durneen introduces the first of two Special Issues of Short Fiction in Theory and Practice dedicated to the theme of ‘the health of the short story’. She considers the short story’s formal affinity with instability, fractured spaces and the fragility of existence, along with its ability to heal. She also comments on the way in which metaphors drawn from health are often deployed in relation to anxieties about the status and the survival of the short story form. She reflects on the literary context of writing and publishing during the COVID-19 pandemic and introduces the reader to the contents of the journal.
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- Articles
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All the small things: Depicting the randomization of grief in (digital) short fiction
By Lynda ClarkWhen I read scholar Tia-Monique Uzor’s recent tweet about how she had been thinking about grieving as a practice and how to hold spaces for collective grief and to make room for grief over seemingly small things, I realized that this was what I had been doing when writing fiction that was obliquely about my sister’s death. The collective grief I had sought was not the public ritual of the funeral, but the asynchronous sharing of short fiction. I needed to grieve not only the big, obvious losses of my sister and way of life during COVID-19 but also all the ‘seemingly small things’ that come together to constitute my experiences of loss. This article is an attempt to reflect on that process and how complex narrative structures can provide a tool for expressing complex emotions and experiences. It considers grief as a multifarious topic and writing techniques for conveying that multiplicity. Finally, it explores technology, randomization and text generation as tools which further expand writers’ expressive capabilities.
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Only anecdotal: Diane Williams, loneliness and short story form
By Sam ReeseTraditionally, the short story has been understood as almost synonymous with loneliness, characterized by theorists and writers like Frank O’Connor as the quintessential ‘lonely form’. Contemporary short story writer Diane Williams stands out for her idiosyncratic challenge to the conventions of short story structure, drawing deliberately on the partiality and contingency of the anecdote. Analysing the structure and style of Williams’s 2016 collection Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, this article explores how a turn to anecdotal structures might shift the short story form’s traditional polarity towards loneliness – a particularly urgent question in an increasingly lonely culture.
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The ailing maternal body as a site of incommunicability, unknowability and violence in Willa C. Richards’s ‘Failure to Thrive’
More LessAmerican author Willa C. Richards’s short story ‘Failure to Thrive’ (2019) thematizes physical, mental and emotional health by centring a young and presumably White American couple and their newborn. The couple have trouble communicating with each other, and crucial pieces of information are withheld from the reader as well. At the same time, numerous references to different types of violence emerge as markers of the maternal throughout the story to such an extent that the maternal body becomes the site not only of difference and unknowability but of violence as well. I anchor my analysis in motherhood studies and argue that motherhood is the discursive lens through which interlocking issues of embodiment, dehumanizing medical practices and diverse types of violence are exposed in ‘Failure to Thrive’. While attending to the narrative design of the story, I demonstrate how the ailing mother becomes a figure on whom the tropes of violence and incommunicability as well as the wide-reaching implications of ill health are mapped out.
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Short stories of expanded lives: The augmented human in Edith Nesbit’s ‘The Five Senses’, Mary E. Braddon’s ‘Good Lady Ducayne’ and Clotilde Graves’s ‘Lady Clanbevan’s Baby’
By Zoé HardyThe ability for short fiction to address the issue of expansion might strike as a paradox. Yet at the turn of the nineteenth century, many fictional tales depicting augmented men or women were published in the form of short stories, dealing each in their own way with various scientific interventions altering, for better or worse, the health condition of their protagonists. Authors such as Edith Nesbit, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Clotilde Graves – to name but a few – experimented with the limits of human and textual bodies alike. This intersection will be examined in three of these writers’ narratives: ‘The Five Senses’ (1909) by Nesbit, ‘Good Lady Ducayne’ (1896) by Braddon and ‘Lady Clanbevan’s Baby’ (1915) by Graves. As this article argues, brevity creates a favourable environment for a poetic of expansion to emerge in these texts, thus allowing for the development of imaginative and meaningful representations of bodily and intellectual improvement. To support this claim, I will posit that suggestion and selection, two by-products of the economy of signs which characterizes short literary forms, provided creative ways for the authors to shape and deliver augmented texts.
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Walking with shadows: Writing trauma, short fiction and Jungian psychoanalysis
More LessA growing field at the intersection of literary and trauma studies makes the persuasive case for creative writing as a means to represent and process trauma across a range of genres from traditional memoir to hybrid and fictionalized approaches. Yet, despite this, how the specific qualities of short fiction can expand on existing modes remains theoretically underexplored. This article offers an intervention into the aforementioned field through an exploration into how the qualities of brevity and experiment that are associated with short fiction can be employed to mirror and synthesize aspects of the psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s ground-breaking work on the unconscious and his narrative approaches to processing trauma. First, this article presents the short story ‘Disappearing Act’, a hybrid of memoir and short fiction based on a personal traumatic experience of childhood abuse and informed by the Jungian concept of individuation (commonly referred to in contemporary psychoanalytic circles as shadow work). Second, it includes an accompanying critical reflection on the story’s creative process and the ways in which autobiographical short fiction can be employed as a mode of shadow work to demonstrate how the form operated as a creatively rich device to process traumatic life material for this writer.
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‘Cat Person’: Essayism, virality and the digital future of short fiction
More LessThe digital revolution has brought back to the fore questions about the health of the short story. Short fiction scholars have for some time now been considering the possibilities that post-book and online spaces might open for the short story form and its popularity among readers. Despite this, when Kristen Roupenian’s New Yorker short story ‘Cat Person’ went viral late in 2017, critics of the genre paid virtually no attention to it. This article sets out to correct this on the premise that studying the ‘Cat Person’ phenomenon can help us refine our understanding of the behaviour and potential of short stories in digital spheres. It focuses, to explore this, on the fact that Roupenian’s text was received as an essay, rather than a short story, by many of its first readers, and accounts for this miscategorization in two different yet interlinked ways. First, it situates the piece in a tradition of women’s storytelling that has long been blurring the line between fiction and non-fiction. And second, it examines the reception of ‘Cat Person’ in the context of social media platforms that promote personal and reality-based modes of expression and communication. The article concludes by conceptualizing a connection between non-fictional interpretations of the story and its virality. Such link complicates accounts about the amenability of short fiction to online environments, suggesting that a story’s capacity to relinquish its identity as such and take on functions of the essay genre might play a key role in determining its performance online.
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- Stories
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‘Les Aliénés’
More LessA short story following a young woman named Bernadette and her stay at a mental hospital in Paris.
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‘Gate Five’
By Nancy FreundThe first full day of it, emergency room admittance to the bed he died in four days later, all I could think to say was, ‘Dad, I’m here’. And then somehow, I was granted more. Something fuller, more creative, and infinitely better. This is what a writer hopes for. A daughter. A human being. A fragile baby soul emerging, in utero, as it were. We wish for the words and humility to say them – voiced or penned – and the miraculous understanding that their expression is received. Their intention is fulfilled, at least to some extent, and that pain’s at bay, even if only for a moment.
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- Book Reviews
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The Golden Age of British Short Stories: 1890–1914, Philip Hensher (ed.) (2020)
By Tom UeReview of: The Golden Age of British Short Stories: 1890–1914, Philip Hensher (ed.) (2020)
London: Penguin, 640 pp.,
ISBN: 978-0-14199-220-4, h/bk, £25;
ISBN 978-0-24143-431-4, p/bk, £12.99
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The Bloomsbury Handbook to Katherine Mansfield, Todd Martin (ed.) (2021)
More LessReview of: The Bloomsbury Handbook to Katherine Mansfield, Todd Martin (ed.) (2021)
London: Bloomsbury Academic, 534 pp.,
ISBN 978-1-35011-144-8, h/bk, £130.00
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- Interview
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Acts of love and philosophy: In conversation with Irenosen Okojie
Authors: Lucy Dawes Durneen and Irenosen OkojieAn interview with leading British fiction-writer Irenosen Okojie, transcribed and edited following a Zoom conversation with Lucy Dawes Durneen in December 2021 in Cambridge. It also includes questions from creative writing students. Okojie discusses her own practice as short story writer, including the choice of titles and short story endings, and issues of representation facing Black writers, especially in relation to female characters. She also discusses her non-fiction as a method of dealing with trauma and feelings of vulnerability.
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- Afterword
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You give me fever: Health, happiness and the inherent vitality of the short story
By Kirsty GunnAward-winning fiction writer Kirsty Gunn reflects on the current climate of short-story publishing in the United Kingdom, and considers the way the rhetoric of sickness and health has become attached to discussions of the form.
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