Eudora Welty: Writers' Reflections upon First Reading Welty

Burning the Breadboard:A New Approach to The Optimist's Daughter Peter Schmidt In one of Eudora Welty's The Optimist's Daughter's most vivid scenes, when Laurel McKelva Hand confronts her stepmother Fay during the novel's climax, Laurel uses a wooden breadboard made by her dead husband Philip to stand for all that she values and Fay trashes. Laurel even weaponizes Philip Hand's handmade creation: "Laurel held the board tightly" as she threatens to smack Fay with it. "[F]or a moment it seemed to be what supported her, a raft in the waters, to keep her from slipping down deep, where the others had gone before her" (991). Defending her family against Fay's invasion, holding up a board that Fay has burnt, scarred, and ruined, Laurel boasts that it represents the "whole story, Fay. The whole solid past," to which Fay replies, "The past isn't a thing to me. I belong to the future, didn't you know that?" (991). Such a vision of the past as a solid, well-made life raft to be remembered and defended against vandals is a frequent theme in Welty's final novel, voiced particularly by Laurel herself but also by her mother, Becky McKelva. This vision is fitted into the novel's structure as carefully as Philip joined the wood pieces to make the breadboard. In a different medium, but with similar loving and meticulous craftsmanship, Welty pinned together snippets of text when she revised and assembled her manuscripts: just as Phil "planed—fitted—glued—clamped—it's made on the true" (OD 989). Remembering Phil, Laurel admits that she has taken their love (and all of their unrealized possibilities together) and by force of memory "sealed [it] away into its perfection," "undisturbed and undisturbing," following her old urge for "self-protection" and thinking of love as "shelter" (997, 997, 980, 980). This essay takes several angles of approach towards more deeply understanding these central tensions in The Optimist's Daughter. Goaded by Fay, Laurel, the novel's protagonist, struggles between her need to control and defend a past she feels is under attack and her intimation that her family's life and values can't truly be honored by such methods. The narrator also tells us that Laurel seeks to be "pardoned and freed"—but why, and from what (992)? Welty's text explicitly connects the possibility of pardon with [End Page 103] Laurel forgiving her parents. How might we understand this tie in The Optimist's Daughter between forgiving others and being pardoned oneself? Key tropes involving burning, binding, and release figure centrally in this discussion. In Welty's short story "The Burning," burning marks an invasion, something to be defended against. Miss Myra and Miss Theo try to stop the looting and torching of their home, yet Welty's one story about the Civil War, published in 1955, departs sharply from standard narratives stressing southern whites' victimization by Yankees (the most famous of which is Scarlett's and Melanie's defense of Tara in Gone With the Wind). The Optimist's Daughter also features a home invasion, and it too has a twist. Laurel reacts with disgust at how Fay has left cigarette burn marks and gouges on Becky McKelva's favorite breadboard (987). Yet, burning other possessions dear to Laurel's mother and father (Judge McKelva) is shown to be a necessary act of release and forgiveness for Welty's protagonist, as she learns that the past—her parents' possessions and best selves—cannot be defended or honored by using the methods she first tries, which involve blockage, denial, and a self-satisfied sense of her own superiority. References to binding and release in The Optimist's Daughter are another way to map Laurel's story arc. Becky McKelva's impassioned recitation on her deathbed of Robert Southey's poem "The Cataract of Lodore" was her plea to be released from death's trial and imprisonment, and from what she took to be her family's willful misunderstanding of her crisis: "With her voice [Becky] was saying that the more she could call back of 'The Cataract of Lodore,' the better she...

Beginning as a poet and a critic of poetry, I wrote my dissertation on William Carlos Williams. It was a great way to begin an academic career since Williams himself never stayed in the poetry lane. His novels were the sites of continuous experimentation (The Great American Novel, White Mule). So, too, were his “mixed form” texts: In the American Grain, Spring and All, Paterson, and the late long poems. Throughout his life, Williams was a true innovator of forms.His short stories were the paring down of speech as he heard it; they were instrumental in creating a new American story. In fact, Williams recognized how important what he had done in writing short fiction was. Invited to the University of Washington in the year following the first of his major strokes, he wrote his highly significant essay about the story as a form. Privileging American speech as he customarily did, Williams showed ways of collapsing the scaffolding of traditional fiction so that characters’ language became the heart of a work. He maintains in his 1949 essay “A Beginning on the Short Story” that “the principal feature of the short story is that it is short—and so must pack in what it has to say…. It seems to me a good medium for nailing down a single conviction. Emotionally.”He references Gertrude Stein’s “Melanctha” and some Poe stories. But rather than discussing them, he jumps ahead with this warning: “You can’t ‘learn’ to write a short story—either from Du Maupassant or Henry James. All you can learn is what Du M. or H. J. did. Every writer must find his or her own form.” He continues, “it isn’t a snippet from the newspaper. It isn’t realism. It is, as in all forms of art, taking the materials of every day and using them to raise the consciousness of our lives to higher aesthetic and moral levels by the use of the art.” Williams spends some time discussing the writer’s mind and his or her imagination. The beginning of a work of fiction is not necessarily unique or even artistic. He says that the short story uses the same materials as newsprint, the same dregs…. What the newspaper uses on the lowest (sentimental) level, the short story had best elevate…. This should make apparent that a mere “thrilling” account of an occurrence from daily life, a transcription of a fact, is not of itself and for that reason a short story. You get the fact, it interests you for whatever reason, of that fact you make, using words, a story. In another segment of the essay, Williams emphasizes the contextual imagination: What sort of a short story must a Gogol have written or a Kipling in India—in their time? And so, practically speaking, what sort of short story must be written in the U.S. or the Northwest today? I use the word must, I don’t ask what you would care to do. Each man or woman is born facing a must. Who will drive it through or even see it? The one who will, will be at least justified and happy in his own eyes doing it…. In other words, to write a short story of parts one must know what he is writing about, see it, smell it—be compelled by it—and be writing what ordinarily one doesn’t want to hear. As Williams moved through his exploration of the short story form, he often used a Hemingway story as illustration: “Two-hearted River” and “Short Happy Life” are both mentioned. So is his apt description of the way Hemingway learned his craft: “Hemingway did at first sit at the feet of Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. They taught him a lot. And then he went out and capitalized on it—to at least her disgust, so they say. And she had written at least one magnificent short story. Pound not even one. But then again Hemingway’s not a bad poet and might have been a better one.”This paragraph of William Carlos Williams’s essay gave me my entry to reading Hemingway’s prose, particularly his stories. Starting with Hemingway’s shorter prose forms gave me insight into his craft that had sometimes been derogated as only simple. It was a great—and accurate—insight from Williams, a writer who had himself carved out a niche in the mixed-form pyramids of American modernist writing, from his 1923 Spring and All collection through his 1925 The Great American Novel, into the deceptively fragile stories that perplexed and antagonized so many critics: “The Girl with a Pimply Face,” “A Night in June,” “The Use of Force,” “Jean Beicke,” “Pink and Blue,” “Frankie,” “Verbal Transcription—6 a.m.,” “A Face of Stone,” “Old Doc Rivers,” and many others, filling three volumes of short fiction.As he lectured to the University of Washington students, Williams said, correctly, that “the short story is a wonderful medium for prose experimentation.” The heart of Williams’ understanding of writing the short story, however, was always emotionally based: he honed his art of writing during the Great Depression, when many of his patients were living in a poverty Americans had seldom seen. As he then admitted with his usual candor, I lived among these people. I knew them and saw the essential qualities (not stereotype), the courage, the humor (an accident), the deformity, the basic tragedy of their lives—and the importance of it. You can’t write about something unimportant to yourself. I was involved. That wasn’t all. I saw how they were maligned by their institutions of church and state—and “betters.” I saw how all that was acceptable to the ear about them maligned them. I saw how stereotype falsified them. Nobody was writing about them, anywhere, as they ought to be written about. There was no chance of writing anything acceptable, certainly not salable, about them.It was my duty to raise the level of consciousness, not to say discussion, of them to a higher level, a higher plane. Really to tell…. Until James Laughlin encouraged Williams to publish his stories in collections, they appeared in Leftist magazines and journals: the poor were not good copy for the slick magazines that paid well. Williams aimed to place his fiction in New Masses, American Caravan, New Republic and The Nation. The experimental poet and prose writer had joined the ranks of the Proletariat but he remembered the role the passion of intimate knowledge—the must—had to play for the real writer.I was one of the fortunate academics in the 1960s whose dissertation was published as a book. Wesleyan University Press brought out The Poems of William Carlos Williams and then, in 1970, that press published The Prose of William Carlos Williams. By that time I was so excited about prose that I claimed that Williams’ reputation would eventually be based not on his poems but rather on his stories and novels. That I was wrong only shows how contagious his excitement about the short story (and the novel) was. In another few years, I had learned much more about modernism and had published Hemingway and Faulkner: inventors/masters, drawing obviously from Williams’ placing Hemingway at the feet of Pound and Stein. In that book I began with both writers’ poetry and then moved into their prose, again claiming that the power of their oeuvre stemmed from short forms as they achieved perfection in the writing of them.The 1970s and the 1980s were wonderful decades for explication. Bill Stafford, who then edited the journal Modern Fiction Studies, and Maurice Beebe, who began Contemporary Literature once he had moved away from Purdue University, were hungry for criticism: they wanted to review every academic book that appeared from university presses. They wanted the thorough reading of whatever fiction they found interesting published in their respective journals. Encouraging was a weak word for their responses to writing that came in through the transom. Then George and Barbara Perkins began editing The Journal of Narrative Technique; Bernard Oldsey, College Literature; Jackson Bryer, Tom Inge, and Maurice Duke, Resources for American Literary Study; C. David Mead, The Centennial Review; James Nagel, Studies in American Fiction; Louis Rubin and Kimball King, The Southern Literary Journal; James Phelan, Narrative. There were Studies in Short Fiction and Modernist Studies. There was The Hemingway Review, The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, The William Carlos Williams Review. As the study of American literature became rooted in author societies, a number of other publications appeared: Spring (the E. E. Cummings journal), the Djuna Barnes Review, the Philip Roth Review, the Norman Mailer Review, The Kay Boyle Journal, and The Edith Wharton Review.Supporting those separate journal publications was the over-arching annual compilation published by Duke University Press, American Literary Scholarship. Some years I wrote the essay on American Poetry at the turn into the twentieth century; later I wrote the essay on criticism on William Faulkner. Trained as we all had been on Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Understanding Fiction and Understanding Poetry, we believed firmly in not only explicating the texts we loved but in keeping track of those explications.It was a time of making use of new printing and more accurate publishing techniques. It was also a time of building university and community library resources. Many universities were moving from a focus on undergraduate education to offering graduate programs: such change demanded more and more library resources. There were the St. James Press volumes that kept track of biography as well as criticism (The St. James Press Reference Guide to Short Fiction, as well as to Poetry). There were the Facts on File Reference Guides to Short Fiction as well as other categories. There was Benet’s Readers’ Encyclopedia of American Literature. There was The Encyclopedia of Appalachia, The International Encyclopedia of Sexual Representation, The Readers’ Encyclopedia of American History. It was a period of processing information that had not existed previously or had not existed in such efficient form. Some of us, trained to become critics, instead opted to become bibliographers.Part of the appeal of that kind of sleuthing lay in the new technology of computers, with their amazing memory. Remember, scholars of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s still wrote on typewriters, complete with the use of White-Out for corrections and sheets of carbon paper for making copies. (There was a different kind of White-Out to be used on the carbon copy.) Achieving a fair copy that could be sent to a prestigious journal editor was an irritating and painstaking task. Enclosing the required stamped self-addressed return envelope, should the submission not be accepted, was another debilitating stage in the process. With the computer, saving the submission was easy and safe. Decades later, when the internet changed our process of submission from using the postal service to clicking on “Send,” we barely remembered those early years of laborious typing.The mechanics were changing but those of us who revered Brooks and Warren still believed in the power of explication. Though it may sound sentimental to write this in 2021, we believed in the architecture of formalism, and we also believed it was our duty to share whatever insights we had as readers. Despite the new approaches to “reading literature” that were bombarding the American academy during the 1980s and 1990s, a number of us stayed true to “close reading” and its operating tool, explication. There had always existed a hint of the biographical in this methodology because if the critic had knowledge about an author’s psychology, or about his or her emotional state at the time of writing, we explicators often believed we could read a text more accurately. Hemingway’s physical wounding during World War I became an important component of readings of his war fiction; Melville’s sorrow over the death of his son underlay many of our explications of “Billy Budd”; Sylvia Plath’s anger at various men who professed to love her shaped our readings of not only her poem “Daddy” but also of The Bell Jar. This is not the place to discuss the flood of literary biography that has become fashionable during the twenty-first century, but many of us literary critics have repeatedly succumbed to writing it.Another element in the pervasiveness and thoroughness of explicating texts was the accessibility of manuscript collections and correspondence in archives throughout the United States and England. Some libraries had long held important archives: Yale University’s Beinecke Library was already a storehouse of American modernist treasures. So was the Alderman Library at The University of Virginia, the Lilly Library at Indiana University in Bloomington, the Lockwood Library at Buffalo, an archive especially wealthy in manuscripts for American poems. The California campuses had long been collecting, and then The University of Texas at Austin developed the Harry Ransom Research Center with its myriad holdings.When the John F. Kennedy Library was finally finished at Harvard, the Hemingway Room and its various archives became a resource for the world of Hemingway scholarship. Then came acquisitions by smaller universities—University of Delaware, University of Wisconsin, University of Michigan, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of Florida, and so on. A new sub-set of reading a text became thinking through the various versions of an essay, a story, a poem, a novel, not that such investigation was new, but rather that such attention paid to modernist writers was newly relevant.Part of the credibility of explication drew, I think, from this interest in reading all elements of the work as one process. Explication allowed a kind of wholeness, a way of reading from the inside out, a means of understanding why an author made this or that choice. We were hungry for information: we did not believe in separating the author from the work.Primarily, it seems to me, people with the Ph.D. degree in the Humanities during the mid-twentieth century were a comparatively modest group. Though we might aspire to publish essays, and perhaps even a book or two, we understood that we were primarily teachers. And what we were to be instructing our students in learning was the art or the efficiency of writing, perhaps even before instructing them in the art of reading. A less-than-lofty charge, teaching writing and reading, was shrouded in the chalk dust of diagramming sentences on black boards, of marking “Wrong” the simplest true-or-false questions about parts of speech, of making jokes with friends about students’ misreadings of a story like Kafka’s “Metamorphosis.” (It was the Age of Sputnik, Science degrees were considered superior to Humanities degrees: humanists had become the utility hitters of academic life.)In teaching one of our own favorite stories, however, thoroughly explicating it (to the surprise and even enjoyment of our best students—for every class had those, truly excellent students who gloried in writing and reading well), we learned to perform a close reading of a beloved story. Through attention to sometimes obscure detail, we could help our students learn about the architecture of the short fiction form. We could teach them how crucial a title could be, we could lead them to understand the missing detail, the never-spoken dialogue, the inexplicable rhythm of a lengthy description. We could expand their reading experience.Becoming performative was a result of the large classrooms that literature courses had come to inhabit during the 1960s. When I taught at Wayne State University, the lead Americanists there, Ralph Nash and Vern Wagner, had convinced administrators that large lecture courses did not work. Class sizes were reasonable, students were good, eager. But when I got to Michigan State, with its student body of over 40,000 students, one of my courses in my first year was held in the chemistry building. The room, which had running water at each seat, held 300 students. My department gave me two teaching assistants and a microphone. Though I created a seating chart for taking attendance, and alternated quiz and test formats, discussion was evanescent. Talking about a text, therefore, stayed the teacher’s job.Across campus in the English Department building, undergraduate classrooms held seventy students, rows of seven seats across and ten rows deep. There were no teaching assistants in these classrooms so learning students’ names was another of the teacher’s responsibilities; some discussion, however, was possible. The hook was some compelling question about the work: why this title? why that character? why this descriptor? In the fifty-three years I spent in literature classrooms, no thrill was greater than the explosion of a student’s imagination when he or she found an unexpected key to meaning, when a smile of discovery showed satisfaction, and the student was ready to become his or her own teacher.Since my retirement nearly a decade ago, I have missed teaching, but I have been enjoying writing once again, writing for myself instead of editing dissertations. Even as I began with the Wiley history of American literature from 1950 to the present, I have decided more often than not to write about authors from my beloved modernist and contemporary periods, and one of the books I’ve enjoyed writing the most has been Hemingway’s Wars: The Public and Private Battles. As I sat with files of notes from the Kennedy Hemingway archive, considering possible structures for this assessment of Hemingway’s fiction, I re-read the Finca Vigia edition of The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. There it was, the way war (both actual and metaphoric) had perplexed his thinking, his personality, his life choices. Among the stories I found most compelling then was “Landscape with Figures.”Thinking about short stories helped me shape another 2017 book, John Steinbeck, A Literary Life. I had contracted this Steinbeck project earlier but had never come to its actual writing. Then I realized that Steinbeck was never a novelist; he was always, by nature and practice, a story writer. Sometimes that skill was employed in his journalism but even more often in the collections of stories that comprised his novellas (Tortilla Flat, Cannery Row, Sweet Thursday) as well as The Pastures of Heaven, The Long Village, The Red Pony, and The Wayward Bus. It seemed to me then that much of the disappointment over Steinbeck’s winning the Nobel Prize for Literature had stemmed from readers’ thinking him inferior to the earlier American novelists who had won that acclaim: William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. For all its sophistication, the American short story was never intended to rival the novel.To close, let me mention a few of the essays on American short stories I’d write now, had I energy enough and time. The world of the American short story is even richer in 2021 than it was a century ago.Henry Dumas, “Strike and Fade,” Echo Tree: The Collected Short Fiction of Henry DumasLauren Groff, “At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners,” FloridaHelena Maria Virmontes, “The Cariboo Café,” The MothsElizabeth Spencr, “Owl,” Th Southern WomanWilliam Faulkner, “Hair,” Collected Stories; Knight’s Gambit: Six Mystery StoriesTerry Tempest Williams, “IX,” When Women Were Birds

Exile and the City F. Scott Fitzgerald's “The Lost Decade”

Reviewed by: The Short Story in German in the Twenty-First Century ed. by Lyn Marven, Andrew Plowman, and Kate Roy Lydia Heiss The Short Story in German in the Twenty-First Century. Edited by Lyn Marven, Andrew Plowman, and Kate Roy. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2020. Pp. vii + 345. Cloth $99.00. ISBN 978-1-64014-046-2. The Short Story in German in the Twenty-First Century sheds light on current thematic and form-based developments in German-language short story writing and fills the void created by a lack of recent academic publications on the genre. Fifteen years lie between its publication in 2020 and that of the most recent edition of Leonie Marx's important theoretical work Die deutsche Kurzgeschichte. But what exactly constitutes a short story? This is a central issue the volume seeks to address. One of the masters of the genre, Edgar Allan Poe, defined the short [End Page 396] story in his famous review of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales (1842) as a story to be read continuously without interruption achieving a "unique or single effect" (61). The editors of the volume, Lyn Marven, Andrew Plowman, and Kate Roy, unfold their central thesis that the short story form is ever-changing and elusive in terms of a fixed definition. Instead, they advocate for a flexible framework for future research, in which any critical approach—be it thematic, form-focused, or based on a certain theoretical perspective—must be specifically tailored to the author, text, or collection at hand. Concerning the German-language short story, the matter of genre definition is further complicated historically and methodologically by terminology, i.e., the difference between Erzählung and Kurzgeschichte, and the delimitation against other German short prose genres like the Novelle. Furthermore, in the twenty-first century, the World Wide Web and digital media have especially impacted the creation and distribution of short stories. The contributions to the volume are grouped into three sections and address form, function, and theme in the works of both well-known and up-and-coming contemporary authors. The theme-centered part of the first section begins with Katharina Gerstenberger's reflections on the "odd" hybrid genre of Berlin short stories, which takes city literature's primary focus on place and blends it with the short story's focus on plot. The second contribution with thematic emphasis by Todd Herzog explores the close link between Poe's definition of the short story and S. S. van Dine's definition of the detective story and stresses the innovative aspect of short crime fiction. The first section's form-centered part presents the short story as a performative, ambiguous, and subjective genre with a tendency toward the political. Emily Spiers highlights that especially its "dialogic" quality and "fragmentary form" are what make the short story performative (51). Kate Roy's contribution focuses on the shortest form of short story writing, the short-short, stating that its extreme brevity underlines the importance of the implicated and the unsaid. Helmut Schmitz closes out the second part of the first section with his reflections on similarities and differences between the German Novelle and the American short story. The second section comprises eight author-focused essays. In the first contribution on well-known writer Clemens Meyer, Gillian Pye detects a lack of academic attention to his short fiction despite his many prizes and wide press coverage. By showing how it is precisely Judith Hermann's sometimes criticized minimalistic style that makes the reader's own reality "present" (139), Leonhard Herrmann presents more recent works of Hermann as underrated by critics. Heide Kunzelmann expands on Austrian writer Alois Hotschnig's tendency toward open-endedness, moments of crisis, and the uncanny in the Western capitalist world and highlights how he makes the disoriented reader complicit in their construction. Through the example of Swiss author Peter Stamm's publication of his collected short stories, Andrew Plowman explores different approaches to collections, their self-reflexivity and construction. Heike Bartel and [End Page 397] Elizabeth Boa investigate the work of Ulrike Almut Sandig and Sylvia Bovenschen. They find that in the digital age, a time of acceleration, these authors use...

From the Editor

Born in 1906 in Nanjing, Zhang began writing in his teens for Mandarin Duck and Butterfly magazines in Shanghai. After 1929, he wrote short stories, middle-length stories, novels and two plays, all in a realistic style. The eighty-odd short stories Zhang wrote between 1929 and 1938 provided the basis for his reputation as a writer of fiction in the pre-liberation period. After 1938, Zhang concentrated on writing literary criticism and theory and after contracting tuberculosis in 1942 he all but stopped writing. Upon the establishment of the Communist republic in 1949 Zhang was assigned to several posts in the literary leadership and wrote a few didactic works for children as well as theoretical and critical articles. He wrote nothing of note after 1960 and his health deteriorated after suffering a stroke in 1975. Zhang died on 28 April, 1985, This thesis considers Zhang's development as a writer of fiction, concentrating attention on the period 1929 to 1938 when Zhang produced his most noteworthy works, but also analysing the place in his career of the recently rediscovered stories written between 1922 and 1928. Zhang's critical and theoretical writings are considered for what they reveal of his literary ideals and are considered as an index to Zhang's success as a writer of fiction. Zhang's development as a writer of fiction is considered chronologically and contemporary political, historical, social and literary influences are alluded to whenever pertinent. Zhang's short stories are also measured against the yardstick of Western practice in the writing of short stories and conventional and unconventional uses of the genre by Zhang are pointed out. Appendices contain a biographical entry about Zhang written in the light of recently published material about Zhang's life and interviews with his family and friends; together with translations of several previously untranslated stories by Zhang.

Checklist of Welty Scholarship 2019 Catherine H. Chengges This checklist is based on current listings in online bibliographies and research done through Carlson Library at the University of Toledo and on helpful information provided by publishers. Useful databases included Ebsco (Academic Search Complete), FirstSearch (WorldCat, WorldCat Dissertations and Theses), and ProQuest (DAI). 1. Bibliographies Chengges, Catherine H. "Checklist of Welty Scholarship 2017–2018." Eudora Welty Review, vol. 11, 2019, pp. 125–30. 2. Works by Welty "Eudora Welty." Die Paris Review Interviews 03, edited by Alexandra von Steffes, Lilienfeld Verlag, 2019, pp. unknown. [German Translation of "The Art of Fiction XLVII: Eudora Welty," Interview with Linda Kuehl 1972, also in Conversations with Eudora Welty, edited by Peggy Whitman Prenshaw, pp. 74–91] "Eudora Welty (1978)." Interview with Jeanne Rolfe Nostrandt, Interviews from the Edge: 50 Years of Conversations about Writing and Resistance, edited by Mark Yakich and John Biguenet, Bloomsbury Academic, 2019, pp. 79–96. [Also in More Conversations with Eudora Welty, edited by Peggy Whitman Prenshaw, pp. 14–30. Also briefly p. 4, 134] "Letter from Eudora Welty to Elizabeth Bowen, August 1951." Eudora Welty Review, vol. 11, 2019, pp. 5–8. "Photographs, 2019." Eudora Welty Review, vol. 11, 2019, pp. 9–10. "Review of Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen, 1938." Eudora Welty Review, vol. 11, 2019, pp. 1–3. 3. Books Pollack, Harriet. New Essays on Eudora Welty, Class, and Race. UP of Mississippi, 2019. [See contributions below by Agner, Donaldson, Ford, Fuller, Griffith, Lumumba, Mark, McMahand and Murphy, Pollack, Taylor, Trefzer, and Warfield] [End Page 251] 4. Essays Agner, Jacob. "Welty's Moonlighting Detective: Whiteness and Welty's Subversion of the American Noir Tradition in 'The Demonstrators.'" New Essays on Eudora Welty, Class, and Race, edited by Harriet Pollack, UP of Mississippi, 2019, pp. 189–213. Baargavi, K. "Application of Sigmund Freud's Psychoanalytical Theory in Eudora Welty's Selected Short Stories." Indian Review of World Literature in English, vol. 15, 2019, pp. 45–47. ["Clytie," "A Piece of News"] Bailey, Tracey. "Two Mississippi Writers: Collection Analysis on the Works of Eudora Welty and William Faulkner in Two- and Four-Year Colleges in Mississippi." Mississippi Libraries, vol. 82, no. 1, 2019, pp. 10–17. Balken, Mackenzie. "Seeing Self Otherwise: Orphaned Otherness and the Power of Narrative in Eudora Welty's 'Moon Lake.'" South Central Review, vol. 36, no. 1, 2019, pp. 1–18. Basseler, Michael. "Epistemological Uncertainty and Knowledge of Maturation in Stories of Initiation: Sherwood Anderson's 'I Want to Know Why,' Eudora Welty's 'A Visit of Charity' and 'A Memory,' and Junot Diaz's 'Ysrael.'" An Organon of Life Knowledge: Genres and Functions of the Short Story in North America, Transcript Verlag, 2019, pp. 141–62. ———. "Gerontophobia, Ageism, and the Wisdom of Later Life in Stories of Aging: Willa Cather's 'Old Mrs. Harris' and Eudora Welty's 'Old Mr. Marblehall.'" An Organon of Life Knowledge: Genres and Functions of the Short Story in North America, Transcript Verlag, 2019, pp. 195–216. Berger, Dianne. "Eudora Welty's Family Elegies: One Writer's Beginnings and The Optimist's Daughter." Eudora Welty Review, vol. 11, 2019, pp. 77–81. Betts, Doris. "'Where Is the Voice Coming From?' By Eudora Welty." Why I Like This Story, edited by Jackson R. Bryer, Camden House, 2019, pp. 43–50. Bezbradica, Viktorija. "Eudora Welty's Cyclical Temporality: Intersections among Memoir, Nonfiction, and Fiction." Eudora Welty Review, vol. 11, 2019, pp. 83–90. [One Writer's Beginnings, The Optimist's Daughter, The Eye of the Story] Bloom, Harold. "Eudora Welty (1909–2001)." The American Canon: Literary Genius from Emerson to Pynchon, edited by David Mikics, Library of America, 2019, pp. 285–94. ["A Still Moment," "The Burning"] Brandon, Caroline. "2018 Eudora Welty Research Fellow Report: Revisions and Revelations in A Curtain of Green and Other Stories." Eudora Welty Review, vol. 11, 2019, pp. 115–23. Crews, Elizabeth. "'The Still-Existing Parts of Life,' Part I: The Early Correspondence of Eudora Welty and Mary Louise Aswell." Eudora Welty Review, vol. 11, 2019, pp. 33–46. Currey, Mason. "Eudora Welty." Daily Rituals: Women at Work. Alfred A. Knopf, 2019, pp. 290–92. Donaldson, Susan V. "Faltering Narrative: Eudora Welty's 'The Burning...

The short story has a unique place in modern prose literary forms. In this way, after the innovator of the short story, it was writer Ku. Alagirisamy who took it to another platform. He is known as the greatest personality among Tamil short story writers. Even though his works are in many forms, it can be known that he has expressed the idea that the short story form has come to convey. He has written more than a hundred short stories. Short story collections such as Anpalippu, cirikkavillai, tavappayan, varappiracatam, kaviyum katalum, cevi caykka oruvn, putiya roja, Thuruvu etc. can be mentioned here. His short story collection 'Anbalippu' won the Sahitya Academy Award in 1970. Even though he was not alive when the award was presented, the 12 short stories in this collection of his short stories are still alive. Even after 52 years, these stories are relevant and comforting to today's situation. In the short stories of K. Alagirisamy, we can know the existence of ideals suitable for human life. Research paper is the symbol of those norms. The opening short story ' Anbalippu' depicts the psychological nature of children. The stories in this collection show the ideals for human life with psychological techniques. In particular, the short stories like Anpalupu, Raja Vantirukkirar, etc. are psychological techniques and reveal human ideals. Although he was not alive when the award was given, the 12 short stories included in this collection of his short stories are still alive today. Even after 52 years, these stories are relevant to today's situation, portraying the psychological nature of children and simple language.

Reviewed by: The Small Canvas: An Introduction to Dreiser's Short Stories, and: Sherwood Anderson: L'Impuissance Créatrice Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin Joseph Griffin . The Small Canvas: An Introduction to Dreiser's Short Stories. Cranbury: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1985. 172 pp. $24.50. Claire Bruyère . Sherwood Anderson: L'Impuissance Créatrice. Paris: Klincksieck, 1985. 370 pp. No price given. Discouraged as he was about his ability to master the short-story form, Dreiser returned to it repeatedly because he wanted to create "pictures of life" of smaller scope than that afforded by the novel. He felt that, as well as a novel, a short story could suggest the finiteness of man in the midst of infinity, "a land, a people, a period, a mood," could dramatize the individual against his background of possibilities and limitations and present a full and satisfactory picture of life. In The Small Canvas, Joseph Griffin discusses Dreiser's artistry in the shorter form and shows that the lack of popularity of Dreiser's short stories was because, like his novels, they questioned rather than glorified traditional values and even upset the moral and social code of the day. After an introduction describing Dreiser's early career as a writer of short fiction and the difficulties he encountered getting his stories accepted by magazine editors, Griffin analyses "Free" and Other Stories (1918) in Chapter Two, Chains (1927) in Chapter Three, and Dreiser's later stories (1929-1938) in Chapter Four. Chapter Five is devoted to tying together the various themes that run through the stories, and to evaluating Dreiser's skill and craftsmanship in the genre. Before discussing any story, Griffin provides information concerning its publication and composition, as well as relevant biographical data, and includes early reviewers' comments. In Part One of Sherwood Anderson, Claire Bruyère discusses Anderson's doubts concerning his ability to write, examining his feelings concerning artistic creation as a whole and his opinion of the work of others. In Part Two, she shows how his obsession with disorder influenced his vision of American society and of Americans and their self-image, then examines how he attempted to solve the literary problems created by his awareness of disorder. Part Three is devoted to a discussion of immaturity: the normal immaturity of childhood and adolescence; the immaturity in particular of American men, who never mature psychologically and reach old age without having ever become emotional adults; and, finally, the immaturity of the blacks who remain emotionally young and who seem able to catalyze the white man's anxiety, thus helping him to mature. Part Four examines the themes of helplessness (impotence) and flight, linking them to social problems. She also shows how Anderson successfully reinvents the "grotesque." Both books are excellent, detailed studies. Although their approaches are radically different, they both cast a new and interesting light on the writers they study. Both books also assume that the reader is familiar with the works of the author under discussion and do not provide plot summaries. Both are highly readable and will be useful to scholars, teachers, and students alike. Finally, I should like to suggest that an English translation of Claire Bruyère's book would be a useful addition to the somewhat scanty body of critical work on Anderson. [End Page 315] Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin University of Ottawa Copyright © 1987 Purdue Research Foundation

Reviewed by: Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories by Lucy Evans, and: Market Aesthetics: The Purchase of the Past in Caribbean Diasporic Fiction by Elena Machado Sáez Karen Fay Yaworski (bio) Lucy Evans. Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2014. Postcolonialism Across the Disciplines 16. Pp. x, 230. £75.00. Elena Machado Sáez. Market Aesthetics: The Purchase of the Past in Caribbean Diasporic Fiction. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2015. Pp. 249. US$65.00. Lucy Evans’ Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories and Elena Machado Sáez’s Market Aesthetics: The Purchase of the Past in Caribbean Diasporic Fiction both ask how Caribbean fictions, including diasporic ones, articulate community and belonging at local and global levels, how internal tensions animate those communities, and how fictional texts formally manifest the social, political, and aesthetic problematics that concern these writers. Evans’ book offers an insightful analysis of how community is conceptualized in eight contemporary Anglophone Caribbean short story collections and cycles. Machado Sáez analyzes contemporary Caribbean diasporic historical fiction as a transnational literary trend and demonstrates how writers negotiate the tension between a postcolonial imperative to ethically depict Caribbean history and subjectivities and market pressures informed by readers’ expectations. In Communities, Evans argues that “the form of interconnected stories is a crucial part of these writers’ imagining of communities which may be fractured, plural and fraught with tensions, but which nevertheless hold together” (2). The grounds for this unity and the various axes of difference that challenge it are central concerns throughout Evans’ book, which draws on literary, cultural, and anthropological studies as well as on musical traditions. The theoretically dense introduction discusses the demographics and histories of Trinidad, Jamaica, and Guyana; surveys theoretical models of Caribbean community; offers a history of the Caribbean short story; and identifies the limitations of short story genre theory. Evans suggests that Edward Glissant’s, Wilson Harris’, and Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s models of association across difference are applicable to “the narrative structure of a short story collection or cycle made up of episodes at once discrete and interrelated” (23). She finds division and unity at many layers of Caribbean society, echoing a prevailing trope in Caribbean studies while refusing to privilege unity, as many studies do. She sees division and unity reflected in the short story form and celebrates [End Page 187] Caribbean writers’ “subtle and complex modes of working through differences without erasing them” (20). Evans’ discussion can likewise be commended for how it illustrates the range of dynamic, complex ways Caribbean writers articulate community without collapsing these into a single or simplified conclusion. The book’s four chapters engage with progressively larger communities, moving from rural to urban, then national, and finally global diasporic collectivities. Chapters One and Two explore works by Olive Senior, Earl Lovelace, Kwame Dawes, and Alecia McKenzie. Evans contends that Senior and Lovelace formally combine modernist conventions with oral storytelling strategies in order to “portray the internal fracture and the heterogeneity characterising Caribbean rural communities more effectively than is possible … [in] traditional ethnography” (46–47). Furthermore, she argues that the short story form “facilitates a [distinct] mode of ethnography” (65) in creating a “multivocal rendering of community” (66). A similar pattern of argumentation emerges in Chapter Two, wherein anthropology loses a competition with literature. Edwidge Danticat and David Chariandy, both cited in Market Aesthetics, resist reader assumptions that fiction set in the developing world functions as social scientific research.1 Evans’ argument celebrates fiction’s capacity to offer more nuanced renderings of community than social science but nonetheless assesses fiction as a social scientific intervention, thereby submitting authors to the pressures Danticat and Chariandy object to. This contradiction notwithstanding, Evans illustrates literature’s capacity for imagining community in ways that anthropology cannot. Evans’ treatment of anthropology at times fails to acknowledge the very different objectives, audiences, methods, and conditions of production that the discipline involves. For example, when she highlights “the capacity of … short story collections or cycles … to incorporate a range of sometimes incompatible perspectives and subject positions; a task which is difficult, although not impossible, within the format of an anthropological study” (28), she submits the...

WAVE OF TALES flooded American magazines during the expanA sive years of the i85o's. As art, all but a few of these works deserve the oblivion that time has bestowed, but because of them the period from I850 to the beginning of the Civil War has been discredited and generally ignored in the history of American short fiction. As a result, the early evolution of the American short story from the magazine tale has been overlooked. In this essay, I propose as a broad hypothesis that the decay of the immensely popular tale fostered the development of the short story as a new genre. If as a total body the fiction has but little aesthetic appeal, that mediocrity prompted a substantial reaction in the decade's literary criticism and among writers of short fiction. Until mid-century, Irving, Poe, and Hawthorne dominated the field, but by i850 Poe was dead and Irving and Hawthorne had all but abandoned the writing of tales. Melville's short works were condemned to their long obscurity, and not until Henry James was a notable tradition of American short fiction again established. A gap in literary history such as this should have inspired a reevaluation long ago. Yet in 1923 Fred Lewis Pattee fixed what has remained the usual verdict when he complained that the short story all but ceased to be distinctive and seemed to disappear as a reputable literary form.' Since then scholars have skimmed the decade's short fiction, occasionally using the material for social and cultural history; but the historical changes that were revolutionizing the short forms have escaped notice. In retrospect, the major theoretical differences between tale and short story are fairly well known, although, unlike novel and prose romance, the short forms have not attracted much critical enquiry. Northrop Frye's distinctions, which are based on characterization,

Explores the relationship between magazine culture and the development of the modern short story form in Britain Foregrounds the role of magazine culture in the development of the modern short story form Analyses a wide range of publications, from standard illustrated popular magazines to avant-garde little magazines Sheds new light on well-known publications and examines others that are as yet obscure or understudied Explores the impact of social and publishing networks on the production, dissemination and reception of short stories Helps recover neglected writers/editors and cast new light on more canonical ones This collection of original essays highlights the intertwined fates of the modern short story and periodical culture in the period 1880–1950, the heyday of magazine short fiction in Britain. Through case studies that focus on particular magazines, short stories and authors, chapters investigate the presence, status and functioning of short stories within a variety of periodical publications – highbrow and popular, mainstream and specialised, middlebrow and avant-garde. Examining the impact of social and publishing networks on the production, dissemination and reception of short stories, it foregrounds the ways in which magazines and periodicals shaped conversations about the short story form and prompted or provoked writers into developing the genre.

The Irish Short Story Mid-Century Two writers, Frank O'Connor and Sean O'Faolain, played an important part in establishing the short story as the quintessential Irish literary form in the middle of the twentieth century. The previous chapter highlighted O'Faolain's influential role as editor of The Bell (1940–6), which gave him the opportunity both through his comments on the short story form and through publishing such authors as Frank O'Connor, Bryan MacMahon, James Plunkett, Mary Lavin, Sam Hanna Bell, Mary Beckett and Michael McLaverty, to mould the Irish short story of this period. O'Faolain's views on what the modern short story should be were incorporated into his study, The Short Story (1948), where he endeavoured to distinguish the modern short story from the loosely structured tale of oral tradition by associating the short story with concision, irony and open-endedness and stressing that the modern short story differed from the tale or anecdote in being chiefly ‘an adventure of the mind’. In his view, the modern short story achieved its best effects through suggestion and implication: the influence of Chekhov on the Irish short story was still much in evidence. O'Faolain's own stories from this period, in Teresa and Other Stories (1947) and The Finest Stories (1957), display an uneven application of his theories of what the modern short story should be doing: rather than focusing on psychological exploration, many of them are taken up by satirizing aspects of Irish life. Frank O'Connor described Irish literature in these years as being ‘diverted’ by the realities of Irish life, and stories such as ‘The Man Who Invented Sin’ express O'Faolain's barely contained resentment against the claustrophobic nature of Irish life and the role of the Catholic Church in hampering individual fulfilment. The comedy of a story such as ‘Unholy Living and Half Dying’ does not disguise the fact that mid-century Ireland is as much a place of stagnation and paralysis as it was in the stories of Moore and Joyce. In ‘Lady Lucifer’, three representatives of the intelligentsia, a priest, a bank clerk and a doctor, debate whether they should stay in a country where so many lead lives of quiet despair.

This chapter demonstrates how racial literacy can be fostered through a formalist approach to short stories by Black, Latinx, Native, Arab American, and Asian American writers, which alerts students to the social construction and power dynamics of race takes a formalist approach to the process of syllabus design in the multiethnic literature classroom, arguing that racial literacy is an essential learning objective in multiethnic literature courses. The author considers an aspect of the formal politics of teaching texts that teachers tend to take for granted--the short story form--and asks, What are the consequences of relying heavily on short forms--especially the short story--in teaching about race? The chapter demonstrates both the pitfalls and advantages of using short texts in the multiethnic literature classroom.

Lyudmila Parts, ed. Russian Twentieth Century Short Story: A Critical Companion. Brighton: Academic Studies Press, 2010.359 pp. $49.00, cloth. $24.95, paper.As Lyudmila Parts reminds us in her brief but informative introduction, the Russian short story has always been most prominent in times of transition, acting as harbinger of social and political change and serving as catalyst for literary innovation and evolution. short story, according to Parts, has always been a form that responds with immediacy to the sensibilities of its (p. xvii), whether we are talking about the rise of the genre in the early nineteenth when it marked shift from poetry to prose; Chekhov's stories at the turn of the twentieth which reasserted the importance of the short story at time of political and cultural crisis; or the stories of Vasilii Shukshin in the 1960s and Tatiana Tolstaia and Liudmila Petrushevskaia in the 1980s, which reinvigorated the genre in the post-Thaw period and glasnost'. Parts's collection aims to acquaint the reader with some of the most illuminating critical articles treating the short stories that best represent the genre in twentieth-century Russian literature (p. xiii). As such, it seeks to fill gap in critical attention accorded the modern Russian short story.Of the eighteen chapters, only five appear for the first time in this volume. others are reprints of works that have appeared previously. Taken on an individual basis, all of the contributions offer provocative analyses of individual stories by Chekhov (The Darling), Bunin (Gentle Breath), Babel (Pan Apolek, My First Goose), Zoshchenko (The Electrician), Olesha (Liompa), Nabokov (Spring in Fialta), Pasternak (Childhood of Luvers), Platonov (The River Potudan), Kharms (The Old Woman), Shalamov (Condensed Milk), Tertz (Pkhentz), Shukshin (Cutting Them Down to Size), Tolstaia (The Poet and the Muse), Petrushevskaia (The Lady with the Dogs), Pietsukh (The Central-Ermolaevo War), Erofeev (The Parakeet), Bitov (Pushkin's Photograph), and Pelevin (Nika). Some of these articles are definitive treatments of their topic. Lev Vygotsky's analysis of Bunin's Gentle Breath is classic essay on the short story form and the psychology of the creative process. Aleksander Zholkovsky provides an impressive and exhaustive analysis of the linguistic, cultural, biographical, and intertextual aspects of Zoshchenko's The Electrician. Eric Naiman's reading of sexuality and utopia in Platonov is one of the best concise treatments of the writer I have read. Catharine Nepomnyashchy's treatment of criminality in Tertz's Pkhents is superb example of textual, biographical, and cultural analysis. Diane Nemec Ignashev's reading of Cutting Them Down to Size remains the finest succinct treatment of the salient features of Shukshin's artistic program to date. Equally authoritative and notable is Mark Lipovetsky's analysis of postmodem themes in Pietsukh and Erofeev.There is no denying the quality of these and the other articles of the collection, which, according to Parts, all address the major aesthetic and thematic concerns of the short story genre in the twentieth century, in particular language, childhood, and memory (p. xxiv). Unfortunately, despite these last three common themes, the anthology taken as whole still reads more like collection of individual articles and less like an in-depth look at the Russian short story genre in the twentieth century. …