Early-Modern Diversity: The Origins of English Short Fiction

Abstract

This chapter addresses the origins of printed short fiction in England from the Tudor days to the end of the seventeenth century. Any search for the origins of the short story must necessarily acknowledge that early-modern prose fiction precedes the modern short story and the modern novel, and that its great diversity makes it impossible to describe the short story's origins in evolutionary terms, as some historians of the genre have tried to do. Nevertheless, the shorter forms of fiction sketched in this chapter cultivated a number of features that anticipated the nature of the short story when it became established in the nineteenth century. The most obvious of these features include the appearance of stories in the medium of print and in the language of prose rather than verse. William Caxton's edition of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in 1476 marks the transition from late-medieval storytelling to an era when fiction, in short and longer forms, became part of a literary culture that was significantly reorganized by print. By the middle of the sixteenth century, printed books, including collections of short fiction, were ‘the primary form in which readers encountered the written word’ in a market that made writing of all kinds ‘available in hitherto unimaginable quantities’ and for ‘hitherto unreachable segments of the social world’. The Canterbury Tales are told in verse, but print made verse less important as a tool for memorizing stories and so promoted the transition of narrative literature into prose, along with a shift away from the public recitation of stories towards silent reading. The new print market created new audiences beyond the court, but it also incorporated the aristocratic readership. The stigma surrounding print that served to preserve the exclusiveness of some traditional court genres hardly affected prose, and by 1600 as much as ‘one-quarter of the books printed in England were prose fiction’. This fiction was written in a variety of modes, long and short, and it reflects, as Paul Salzman argues, ‘both the increased reading public and the writers’ interest in experiment’.