A Move against the Dinosaurs: The New Puritans and the Short Story

Abstract

The short story in Britain experienced a modest, but significant, change in its fortunes at the end of the 1990s and in the first years of the new millennium. Despite the bleak commercial prospects for the short story as a genre, new authors took up the form as an outlet for their creative energies, feeling that established writers already occupied the space reserved for the literary novel and mainstream literature in general. This state of things is perfectly exemplified in the anthology All Hail the New Puritans (2000), an interesting attempt by a group of young writers to introduce some excitement in the somewhat rigid literary scene of their time. In the present article the achievement of this volume of short stories is assessed in connection with similar collections published in the same period.