Short Fiction in Theory & Practice - 1-2: Landscape and Temporality in Short Fiction, Part 2, Apr 2025

In this article, I focus on how the figurations of feral children transform the jungle into a chronotope in Andrés Barba’s novella, entitled A Luminous Republic. First, I analyse the significance of the dichotomous arrangements of island spaces and how the narrative – incorporating the discourse of the locals – describes the children from the jungle as an invasive species, with which it also constitutes the binary opposition of us vs. them. In other words, I examine how the tight-knit community of San Cristóbal further isolates itself by trying to segregate the children who seem to have appeared out of the blue. Secondly, I argue that the figures of ‘primitives’ and children, as well as the processes of ontogenesis and phylogenesis, become interchangeable due to the residents’ collective fear of regressing to unconscious and uncontrollable urges. Thirdly and finally, I examine zoopoetic figures in the text, i.e. the comparison of children with various types of animals, from wild beasts to insects. I argue that through the use of such tropes, the narrative not only elaborates on the children’s adaptive abilities, but also constitutes a discourse that seems appropriate to their existence, which is both spatially and temporally out of sync with that of the natives of San Cristóbal.

Daphne du Maurier’s ‘The Old Man’ (1952) and ‘The Lordly Ones’ (1959) share thematic and structural similarities, particularly in their exploration of evocative landscapes imbued with mythic significance. Both stories also depict parental neglect and cruelty, as well as animal–human hybridity, reinforcing Cornwall’s literary tradition as a liminal space where myth and psychological tension coexist. Du Maurier’s landscapes function as chronotopes, collapsing past and present into mythic time, and as palimpsests, layering folklore, memory and personal experience. Drawing from psychogeographic traditions, the stories map emotional and historical anxieties onto physical settings, transforming the West Country into a site of literary remythification. Ultimately, these stories reveal the cyclical nature of human brutality, blending Gothic and mythological elements to resist nostalgia and instead present a dynamic, psychologically rich vision of place.

This article examines the effect of the writing environment on the writer, the subsequent impact on what is written and the reasons for this, focusing on the relationship between writer, writing space and memory. In its exploration of the effects of writing spaces on the writer and what is written, it draws on affect theory and humanistic geography, alongside the writing of Georges Perec and Gaston Bachelard. This article considers the concept of space and the process through which a ‘space’ may become a ‘place’. Arguing that, rather than being static, the relationship between writer and space is subject to continued change, that memory is a key factor in building this relationship and that the writer’s ultimate aim is always to make the space a ‘home’ for her writing.

This creative-critical article examines two short stories by Latinx authors Mariana Enríquez and Samantha Schweblin simultaneously in their original form in Spanish and their subsequent English translation. It highlights important aspects of the texts which are lost in the translation but are essential to understand their reinventing of the haunting trope by bringing it in to urban spaces and connecting it to particular sociopolitical contexts. This article also highlights how these authors’ storytelling can be read through Mark Fisher’s theory of the ‘eerie’ and the ‘weird’ – and proposes that their work chooses an ingenious hybrid approach. I bring in my own original short fiction to the discussion to show how I am following this hybrid tradition and ‘urban reweirding’ of the haunting trope by reflecting on two of my published short stories, ‘No Greater Love’ (Extra Teeth, 2023) and ‘Flatworms’ (Toasted Cheese Literary Journal, 2022).

This article presents an overview of the topic I have been exploring in recent years – the role of landscape in contemporary British women’s fiction. Here I focus specifically on the use of the short story in relation to temporality and the Anthropocene. In discussing stories by Zoe Gilbert, Sarah Hall, Daisy Johnson and Lucy Wood, I contextualize them within what has been termed as ‘Anthropocene feminism’, which regards the effects of climate change and species loss as man-made, and posits a posthuman future after the end of patriarchy. As the first section argues, this revolutionary project is in sharp contrast with the melancholia that underwrites the work of critics such as Mark Fisher, Robert Macfarlane and Adam Scovell. Instead, I argue that it has much more in common with how China Miéville understands the Weird in non-hauntological, ‘abcanny’ terms. The second section applies this critical vocabulary to short fiction and demonstrates how it describes patriarchy as moribund, visualizes landscape and the natural world in non-anthropocentric terms, utilizes Weird temporal effects and figures a posthuman future at the expense of animal and sexual differences.

This article examines André Gide’s short narrative El Hadj (1896) by looking at the symbolic and metaphysical role of the desert. I explore how Gide uses the desert as a backdrop to delve into themes of spiritual disillusionment, intellectual emancipation and the critique of religious and literary discourses. I show how the barren landscape of the desert symbolizes emptiness and deception, encouraging readers to question the origins of religious myths, the nature of faith and reality and the authority of both religious and literary figures.

The vision of the ‘rural’ in Indian literary and aesthetic traditions is significant for a critical interpretation of literary and cultural texts emerging from India. This article presents a critical reading of select short stories of the Bharatiya Jnanpith Award recipient Tarasankar Bandyopadhyay (1898–1971) in the context of rural writings. Having spent most of his life in Birbhum, Bandyopadhyay internalized the peculiarities of rural Bengal in his stories. Bandyopadhyay’s visualizations of the rural transcend conventional notions, weaving a rich, earthy texture that construct an artistic and symbolic system of language and images drawn from everyday life. The conceptual framework of the present research is supported by the theory of literary carnivalization proposed by the Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975). The short stories of Bandyopadhyay might be read in the light of the social realism that weaves elements of ‘grotesqueness’ into the pastorality of rural landscapes. Through close readings of two stories; ‘Tarini Majhi’ (1936) and ‘Santan’ (1938), the study explores certain facets of rural life, highlighting the visceral interplay between survival and crisis. The select stories encapsulate the rich and multifaceted world of Bandyopadhyay’s Birbhum which are at once sensuous, artistic and eccentric, offering profound insights into the lived experiences of its characters. Bakhtin’s concepts of the idyllic and the grotesque in his discussions of Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1984) and Rabelais and His World (1984) provide the conceptual basis to the present research on Bandyopadhyay’s stories. This study aims to creatively understand aesthetics of the ‘rural’, positioning Bandyopadhyay’s short fiction as a critical space to reimagine the literary representation of rural India and its enduring complexities.

Marco Caracciolo says ‘postapocalyptic fiction implies and foregrounds a catastrophic rupture between a preapocalyptic and a postapocalyptic state of the storyworld’. This article shows, however, how female characters in postapocalyptic landscapes resist such a rupturing, often by continuing with preapocalyptic activities in a bid to find stability and hope in a ruined or deeply changed world. This critical–creative paper will explore how female characters use preapocalyptic activities, such as list-making or sculpture, to navigate dying or troubled landscapes. The critical element of the article will consider the idea of list-making in Carmen Maria Machado’s short story ‘Inventory’, while the creative element – a postapocalyptic short story called ‘Maybe the Birds’ and which is partially a creative response to Machado – will tell the story of a female potter who decides to make ceramic bird syrinxes, or voice boxes, in a bid to try and keep birdsong alive after most life on Earth ends. In what may be a final act of artistic activism, she hangs these in the trees so her dog can hear them when the wind blows, her legacy being to ‘leave him the birds’ after she has gone.

Review of: Best British Short Stories 2024, Nicholas Royle (ed.) (2024)

Norfolk: Salt Publishing Ltd, 231 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-78463-309-7, p/bk, £10.99

Review of: Fire Ready, Jane Rogers (2024)

Manchester: Comma Press, 188 pp.,

ISBN-13 978-1-91269-776-2, p/bk, £10.99

Review of: He Used to Do Dangerous Things, Gaia Holmes (2024)

Manchester: Comma Press, 166 pp.,

ISBN 10-1912697793, p/bk, £10.99

Review of: Dogs and Monsters, Mark Haddon (2024)

London: Chatto and Windus, 273 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-78474-555-4, h/bk, £20.00