Short Fiction in Theory & Practice - Volume 3, Issue 1, 2013

By submitting an original short story and an essay exploring its genesis, antecedents and composition, this article explores the creative process in the context of the demands being made upon creative writers to position their writing as research within the UK higher education academy. Whilst pointing to the rigidity of current research models it also indicates the intense subjectivities at play in the reading and realization of fictional forms, discussing both process and affect in doing so.

This article considers Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s use of the short story form and authorial, character and narrative voice in her theatrical tale ‘Prince Ramji Rowdedow’ (1874). As context for this article prevailing Victorian approaches to narrative voice will be considered, alongside Braddon’s acting and playwright careers, emphasizing her knowledge of how the voice is utilized on and offstage. The thesis of this article is that although the voice can be fragmented, it is a vital and powerful element of identity construction for both fictional characters and real people. However, Braddon’s deliberate exposé of the highly constructed nature of the theatre demonstrates that a person’s identity is socially rather than individually constructed.

This article explores innovative uses of the short story format in the recent collection Crimespotting: An Edinburgh Crime Collection (2009). The article examines these crime short stories’ use of ‘place’, specifically Edinburgh, as a unifying theme and setting for its diverse crime motifs. The article analyzes how selected texts from the collection negotiate the short story format and the crime genre, and explores the diverse fictions which emerge from this. The article suggests that the short stories in Crimespotting: An Edinburgh Crime Collection illustrate how the genre’s diversity and range may expand the possibilities of crime fiction in challenging and unexpected ways.

There is a glaring disparity between the number of short stories being published by writers of Haitian origin and the body of literary criticism that exists on these stories. This article examines the relationship of narration and nation and will seek to bring the Haitian short story to the fore with specific emphasis on the voice of the griot in the 1960 collection Romancero aux étoiles/A Serenade to the Stars by writer Jacques-Stéphen Alexis. The griot, a traditionally African figure, is the ever-present narrator in this collection, thus reminding the reader of the strong connection of the Haitian short story to African oral traditions. The article begins by analysing Alexis and how he integrates his réalisme merveilleux approach to literature. It then locates Alexis’ collection within the framework of Haitian short fiction. The narrative voice that Jacques-Stéphen Alexis uses in his short stories is a multifaceted one that reflects the political environment of a nation that is perpetually reminded of its tenuous history and fecund culture.

This article will explore Annie Proulx’s treatment of the expansive Wyoming setting and the characters’ traumatic lives in ‘Brokeback Mountain’ as factors that would seem to militate against the generic limits of the short story form. Through Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, I will argue that Proulx represents memory and geography in images in which time and space coalesce or are torn asunder to signify a love that literally dare not speak its name because it would be lethal to do so. The story’s central theme of queer love between two novice shepherds has a concomitant effect on what constitutes the normative in Wyoming’s fiercely patriarchal and machismo world. This results in a range of chronotopes in which heteronormative space and time undergo queer revision. Drawing upon queer theory tropes such as futurity and counterpublics, I suggest that Proulx’s queering of the literary form of the pastoral recalibrates notions of domesticity and the family. Proulx’s imagery thus reveals an alternative ethic secretly at work in the story’s milieu that narrative discourse opens to the reader even if its secret significance is sullied and even silenced by rural myth and history in its represented world.

Mainland Chinese writer Can Xue (1953–) has one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary fiction. Her short pieces have been favourably compared with those of Kafka and share something of the same metamorphic transformation of the social order into something more oneiric and malleable. This article discusses the critical reception of her work that has tended to interpret her innovative narrative strategies as a response to the trauma suffered by her family during the Cultural Revolution, noting that the author herself plays down these political considerations, stressing instead the attempt to depict a singular internal world. It suggests that Gilles Deleuze’s concept of ‘legending’ provides a way of negotiating between the external socio-political contexts and the internal ‘soul worlds’ of Can Xue’s writing, and outlines the importance of the concept for a reading of short fiction in general.

The varied forms of short prose writing used by Primo Levi in his continued narrative of the Holocaust allows a reconsideration of him as not merely its witness, but also as its storyteller. Taking The Periodic Table ([1975] 1986) as a conscious shift in Levi’s writing direction this article examines where the fictional developments and memory collide, and attempts to assess if this produces a more memorable format in order to reveal a difficult history. Do we continue to read Levi because his honesty is greater than the bare facts, and is there such a thing as a Holocaust aesthetic?

This article explores some of the political, but accessible and entertaining, short fiction written during the 1930s by women writers in Britain, which has been neglected both in work on the short story and by work on the period. It discusses as examples of the possibilities of this kind of writing some of the short fiction of Winifred Holtby, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Naomi Mitchison, with a particular focus on their uses of unreliable narration.

In this article, I show how the ‘narratorial presence’ (our aesthetic experience of being in the story), constructed for the reader in relation to each specific story, occurs at the intersection of highly nuanced narratological structures and reading conventions. Such conventions can also shape our view of ‘borderline’ texts as either ‘story’ or ‘essay’. Drawing first on narratological features originally articulated by Franz Stanzel and Gerard Genette, this article extends these articulations to fully explore and describe the nexus between pronoun choice in short narratives and the specific and heightened effects constructed by readers – that is, narrative perspective, an aspect affecting the entire reading experience.

Of weather and the land: Short fiction from Australia

Forecast: Turbulence, Janette Turner Hospital (2011) Australia: Harper Collins, 232 pp., ISBN: 9780732294441, h/bk, AUD 22.99

In the Shade of the Shady Tree: Stories of Wheatbelt Australia, John Kinsella (2012) Athens, OH, USA: Ohio University Press, 190 pp., ISBN: 9780804011372, h/bk, USD 19.96

Short Story Theories: A Twenty-First Century Perspective, Viorica Patea (ed.) (2012) Amsterdam: Rodopi, 346 pp., ISBN: 978-90-420-3564-5, h/bk, £63.75