Short Fiction in Theory & Practice - Volume 3, Issue 2, 2013

A prolific writer of Gothic shorter fiction, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu published many of his early tales in an Irish periodical. In later life, he also published in both magazine and book form for a British market, where publishers told him to avoid Irish themes. This article discusses the process through which Le Fanu recycled some older ‘Irish’ material into a collection of short stories linked by the imaginary English setting of Golden Friars. Drawing on theoretical links between short story collections and the ‘genre’ of the ‘narrative of community’, the article analyses how Le Fanu set about representing community life while transplanting his material from Irish to English settings, and from magazine to book formats. While the representation of an Irish community would have been ideologically problematic and formally irrelevant for Le Fanu, his portrayal of an English community in Chronicles of Golden Friars (1871) is characterized by stereotypes and parodic exaggerations that betray its origin in the demands of his English publishers.

This article argues that writing about fishing and marine biology allowed Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck, respectively, to express a resistance to narrative resolution. Hemingway’s In Our Time ([1925] 1980) addresses the meaning and aftermath of World War I, while Steinbeck’s Cannery Row (1945) responds to World War II by not talking about it at all. Both books submerge war to discuss its effects on the psyche and landscape and seek solace by depicting rituals that have meaning but do not insist on finality. In this, fishing and specimen collecting provide non-teleological models for cognition and writing that resist the tyranny of resolution. Steinbeck and Hemingway render that celebration of open-endedness and process in the short story cycle because it allows them to meditate on the ongoing ritual of thinking and, by extension, writing.

Two contemporary examples of the short story sequence indebted to Sherwood Anderson’s influential Winesburg, Ohio – Donald Ray Pollock’s Knockemstiff and Laurie Hendrie’s Stygo – illustrate the complex spatiotemporal role of place in the short story sequence. The reader’s progressive assembly of the imaginative space in these latter-day Winesburgs works in conjunction with other associative configurations to construct macrotexts from the autonomous stories, ones that challenge us to recognize the genre’s formal paradox as we formulate spaces whose gaps and discontinuities reflect the nature of the communities portrayed, of existence within them, and the nature of the genre used to represent them.

This article examines thematic and formal concepts of circularity in the British writer Helen Simpson’s Constitutional (2005), in a reading of the collection as a short story cycle. Circularity recurs in the turning of the seasons, the circulation of the blood, compulsive behaviour and the sometimes futile repetitions enforced by daily routine. Combining Bakhtinian theory with a close reading of the text and Simpson’s own comments on the compositional process, the article shows how Simpson contextualizes the human life cycle in relation to seasonal change and renewal.

This article delivers a close, textual analysis of A. S. Byatt’s The Matisse Stories ([1993] 1994). It argues that Byatt’s text is an example of the short story sequence, a form that is only beginning to establish itself in England. The analysis demonstrates the benefits of reading The Matisse Stories ([1993] 1994) as a sequence of autonomous but linked stories. Focusing on a range of themes and formal properties, the article draws connections between Byatt’s poetics and established theories about the form, paying particular attention to her manipulation of metatextual discourses and her exploration of identity politics in late-twentieth-century England. The article raises issues pertaining to art as well as literature, exploring how Byatt’s engagement with Matissean aesthetics informs her formal strategies and poetics.

This article considers the work of the Guatemalan author Augusto Monterroso as it offers an interesting perspective on the theory and practice of the short story collection. In his essays, Monterroso often comments on the formal features of the short story, its relation to the novel and its marginal status in literary criticism. In addition, he frequently refers to the work of other short story writers. About his own books, Monterroso has said that they are ‘simple deposits’ or ‘boxes’, because they include different kinds of texts: short stories and essays, but also translations of the work of other authors. Examples in case are the collections Movimiento Perpetuo (1972), translated as Perpetual Motion (1995), and La palabra mágica (1983). In this article I analyse Perpetual Motion with a view to determining the precise organization and structure of the collection. Using the concepts of homogeneity and heterogeneity, proposed by theorists such as René Audet and Robert Luscher, I try to discern a pattern in the disparate texts and issues of Perpetual Motion.

The China Factory, Mary Costello (2012) Dublin: Stinging Fly Press, 159pp., ISBN: 9781906539214, p/bk, £10.99.

The Shelter of Neighbours, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne (2012) Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 265pp., ISBN: 9780856408861, p/bk, £12.99.

Critical Insights. Alice Munro, Charles May (ed.) (2013) Ipswich: Salem Press, 300 pp., ISBN: 9781429837224, h/b, £65.54.