Concrete Illuminations

Abstract

This chapter argues that the short story emerges and develops alongside what Henri Lefebvre has termed the “Urban Revolution.” Drawing on Ricardo Piglia’s claim that “short story always tells two stories,” whose convergence catalyses a “profane illumination,” this chapter reads the short story’s doubled form as capturing a specifically urban dialectic, which expresses the interplay between the determining force of capitalist urbanization, and the hidden histories, everydayness, and revolutionary potentials lurking within. To make this claim, the chapter periodizes the history of the American short story and maps its changing generic forms in relationship to four key moments of urbanization: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s romance in the colonial mercantile city; Edgar Allan Poe’s and Pauline Hopkins’ detective fiction and Anzia Yezierska’s and Meridel LeSeur’s ghetto pastoral in the industrial city; Ray Bradbury’s and Samuel Delany’s Science Fiction in the automotive city; and Eden Robinson’s SF refiguration in the logistical or neo-mercantile city.