Short Fiction in Theory & Practice - The Short Story and Ecology, Apr 2024

This article proposes that in Sarahland (2021), Sam Cohen makes of the short story cycle form a productive arena in which to explore queer ecological concerns. Reading with queer ecocritic Nicole Seymour, it argues that the early stories frame heteronormativity as an ecology of harm whilst also exploring the difficulties of using critical theory to create more caring, queerer alternatives. The later stories, in making their environmentalist concerns more explicit, go further in articulating a queer ecological consciousness. The discussion focuses on how Cohen creates a dense ecology of affective, narrative and symbolic connections between the component stories. It suggests that the short story cycle is a form rich with possibility for exploring questions of queer futurity, ecology and belonging.

This article explores what might be revealed by a reading of D. H. Lawrence’s earliest short story collection from our present perspective of the Anthropocene. What signs might there be of his later expression of his anxieties about human relationship with the cosmos? Is his later articulation of the tensions that are the source of those anxieties to be found in his earliest short fiction? How successful is his earliest mode of the short story in raising questions that might trouble his readers today? Do stories written by Lawrence around the First World War offer any clues to the causes of our present environmental crisis? How does the relationship between nature and gender that would guide an ecofeminist reading contribute to and problematize all these foregoing questions?

Juliana Spahr’s generically hybrid ‘Unknown Dragonfly Species’ and Sarah Moss’s composite novel Summerwater are here read in the light of their textual hybridity and with a focus on their short fiction qualities. Different in form, style and content, the two texts share a confrontation of plots concentrating on social concerns – a group of New York friends, an anonymous ‘they’, in Spahr’s ‘Unnamed Dragonfly Species’, old and young couples, families, groups of friends on holiday in Scotland in Moss’s Summerwater – with short texts (chapters in Moss, proper names of endangered species in Spahr) that point to a world beyond the human and that ironically subvert the anthropocentrism and egocentrism that drives many of the characters involved. Read against the backdrop of Ricardo Piglia’s ‘Theses on the short story’, the confrontation of different text types is shown to avoid a one-dimensional focus on human affairs and thus helps to transcend the scope each individual genre – short story, poetry or novel – might cover on its own. Looking at ‘Unnamed Dragonfly Species’ and Summerwater as textually hybrid environmental short fiction, the article argues how the genre perspective may help to produce scenarios in which the human and the more-than-human worlds permeate each other in ways that presage a poetics for the Anthropocene.

‘Raftland’ floats at the spot between short story and prose poem, blurring and bridging the two to encompass an evocative work that addresses and explores plastic pollution in the world’s oceans as well as the far-reaching costs of rising and heating waters. It is a work of assemblages, a poetic piecemeal raft of the comings and goings of a newly flooded society whose degradation of language and livelihoods traces its way back to our current wanton anthropocentrism and consumer capitalism. A dystopic, speculative tale centring on a community forced to inhabit ever-moving raftworlds and continually prove their worth, it is a work that stresses humanity’s catastrophic engagements with the ocean in an effort to prompt renewed vigour towards greater awareness and respectful ontologies to both the planet and its greatest life-giving substance. It is a warning.

From the 1980s to the 2000s, contemporary world fiction gained increasing prominence through the maximalist form of the postcolonial novel. More recently, short story collections with postcolonial themes, realist styles and minimalist constraints have gained in prominence, even as patterns of migration entangle the categories of local and global. This article focuses on two recent and acclaimed books, How to Pronounce Knife by Souvankham Thammavongsa, and Afterparties by Anthony Veasna So, in order to argue that these reflexive, humorous and polyvocal collections provide new and generative iterations of contemporary global fiction through the form of the short story.

This article investigates the usefulness of new formalist terminology for the study of integrated short fiction volumes. It adopts a case-study design: I take Janice Galloway’s short story composite Jellyfish ([2015] 2019) as an example because the author experiments with new ways of writing, arranging and presenting short fiction in this volume. I explore how Caroline Levine’s broad understanding of two forms (networks and rhythms) and their affordances can be brought together with different positions in short story criticism. Particular consideration shall be given to Rolf Lundén’s conceptualization of the characteristic tension between the short story composite as a whole and its component parts. In short, the article analyses the complex networks and rhythms which give structure to Jellyfish.

Review of: Kurdistan + 100: Stories from a Future State, Orsola Casagrande and Mustafa Gundogdu (eds) (2023)

Manchester: Comma Press, 236 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-91269-736-6, p/bk, £10.99