The Essential
Features Of A Short Story
The Essential Features Of A Short Story, Short story,
brief fictional prose narrative that is shorter than a novel and that usually
deals with only a few characters. The short story is usually concerned with a
single effect conveyed in only one or a few significant episodes or scenes.
The form encourages economy of setting, concise
narrative, and the omission of a complex plot; character is disclosed in action
and dramatic encounter but is seldom fully developed. Despite its relatively
limited scope, The Essential Features Of A Short Story, though, a short story is often judged by its
ability to provide a “complete” or satisfying treatment of its characters and
subject. Before the 19th century the short story was not generally regarded as
a distinct literary form.
But although in this sense it may seem to be a uniquely
modern genre, the fact is that short prose fiction is nearly as old as language
itself. The Essential Features Of A Short Story, Throughout history humankind
has enjoyed various types of brief narratives: jests, anecdotes, studied
digressions, short allegorical romances, moralizing fairy tales, short myths,
and abbreviated historical legends. None of these constitutes a short story as
it has been defined since the 19th century, but they do make up a large part of
the milieu from which the modern short story emerged.
As a genre, the short story received relatively little
critical attention through the middle of the 20th century, and the most
valuable studies of the form were often limited by region or era. In his The
Lonely Voice (1963), the Irish short story writer Frank O’Connor attempted to
account for the genre by suggesting that stories are a means for “submerged
population groups” to address a dominating community. The Essential Features Of
A Short Story, Most other theoretical discussions, however, were predicated in
one way or another on Edgar Allan Poe’s thesis that stories must have a compact
unified effect.
By far the majority of criticism on the short story
focused on techniques of writing. Many, and often the best of the technical
works, advise the young reader—alerting the reader to the variety of devices
and tactics employed by the skilled writer. The Essential Features Of A Short
Story, On the other hand, many of these works are no more than treatises on
“how to write stories” for the young writer rather than serious critical
material.
The prevalence in the 19th century of two words, “sketch”
and “tale,” affords one way of looking at the genre. In the United States alone
there were virtually hundreds of books claiming to be collections of sketches
(Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book, William Dean Howells’s Suburban Sketches)
or collections of tales (Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, Herman
Melville’s The Piazza Tales). These two terms establish the polarities of the
milieu out of which the modern short story grew. The Essential Features Of A
Short Story, The tale is much older than the sketch. Basically, the tale is a
manifestation of a culture’s unaging desire to name and conceptualize its place
in the cosmos. It provides a culture’s narrative framework for such things as
its vision of itself and its homeland or for expressing its conception of its
ancestors and its gods.
Usually filled with cryptic and uniquely deployed motifs,
personages, and symbols, tales are frequently fully understood only by members
of the particular culture to which they belong. Simply, tales are
intracultural. Seldom created to address an outside culture, a tale is a medium
through which a culture speaks to itself and thus perpetuates its own values
and stabilizes its own identity. The Essential Features Of A Short Story, The
old speak to the young through tales. The short stories of Ernest Hemingway,
for example, may often gain their force from an exploitation of traditional
mythic symbols (water, fish, groin wounds), but they are more closely related
to the sketch than to the tale. Indeed,
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