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More About This Title A Companion to the American Short Story
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- Sets the short story in context, paying attention to the interaction of cultural forces and aesthetic principles
- Contributes to the ongoing redefinition of the American canon, with close attention to the achievements of women writers as well as such important genres as the ghost story and detective fiction
- Embraces diverse traditions including African-American, Jewish-American, Latino, Native-American, and regional short story writing
- Includes a section focused on specific authors and texts, from Edgar Allen Poe to John Updike
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James Nagel is the Eidson Distinguished Professor of American Literature at the University of Georgia. Early in his career he founded the scholarly journal Studies in American Fiction and the widely influential series Critical Essays on American Literature. Among his twenty books are Stephen Crane and Literary Impressionism, Hemingway in Love and War (which was made into a Hollywood film directed by Lord Richard Attenborough), and The Contemporary American Short-Story Cycle. He has published some eighty articles in the field, and he has lectured on American literature in fifteen countries. In 2005, he was given the lifetime achievement award for contributions to the field by the American Literature Association.
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Notes on Contributors viii
Acknowledgments xiv
Part I: The Nineteenth Century 1
1 The Emergence and Development of the American Short Story 3
Alfred Bendixen
2 Poe and the American Short Story 20
Benjamin F. Fisher
3 A Guide to Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” 35
Steven T. Ryan
4 Towards History and Beyond: Hawthorne and the American Short Story 50
Alfred Bendixen
5 Charles W. Chesnutt and the Fictions of a “New” America 68
Charles Duncan
6 Mark Twain and the American Comic Short Story 78
David E. E. Sloane
7 New England Local-Color Literature: A Colonial Formation 91
Josephine Donovan
8 Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Feminist Tradition of the American Short Story 105
Martha J. Cutter
9 The Short Stories of Edith Wharton 118
Donna Campbell
Part II: The Transition into the New Century 133
10 The Short Stories of Stephen Crane 135
Paul Sorrentino
11 Kate Chopin 152
Charlotte Rich
12 Frank Norris and Jack London 171
Jeanne Campbell Reesman
13 From “Water Drops” to General Strikes: Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Short Fiction and Social Change 187
Andrew J. Furer
Part III: The Twentieth Century 215
14 The Twentieth Century: A Period of Innovation and Continuity 217
James Nagel
15 The Hemingway Story 224
George Monteiro
16 William Faulkner’s Short Stories 244
Hugh Ruppersburg
17 Katherine Anne Porter 256
Ruth M. Alvarez
18 Eudora Welty and the Short Story: Theory and Practice 277
Ruth D. Weston
19 The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Structure, Narrative Technique, Style 295
Kirk Curnutt
20 “The Look of the World”: Richard Wright on Perspective 316
Mikko Tuhkanen
21 Small Planets: The Short Fiction of Saul Bellow 328
Gloria L. Cronin
22 John Updike 345
Robert M. Luscher
23 Raymond Carver in the Twenty-First Century 366
Sandra Lee Kleppe
24 Multi-Ethnic Female Identity and Denise Chávez’s The Last of the Menu Girls 380
Karen Weekes
Part IV: Expansive Considerations 389
25 Landscape as Haven in American Women’s Short Stories 391
Leah B. Glasser
26 The American Ghost Story 408
Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock
27 The Detective Story 425
Catherine Ross Nickerson
28 The Asian American Short Story 436
Wenying Xu
29 The Jewish American Story 450
Andrew Furman
30 The Multiethnic American Short Story 466
Molly Crumpton Winter
31 “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” American Restlessness and the Short-Story Cycle 482
Jeff Birkenstein
Index 502
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