Iftekharrudin, F., Boyden, J., and M. Rohrberger, Eds. 2003. "Postmodern approaches to the short story". Westport, Connecticut and London: Praeger. 156 pp.

Abstract

Short story theory is nowadays a lively area of critical discussion, but this is a new phenomenon. Until very recently if a monograph on the short story was published, it constituted an isolated orphan among a countless list of titles delving into other narrative forms. “No more than a decade ago,” wrote Susan Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey in 1989 “referring to a ‘field’ of short story criticism would have seemed odd” (1989: vii). The book by Lohafer and Clarey, Short Story Theory at a Crossroads set the standard for successive studies that increased in number in the nineties and in the first years of the new millennium. Instead of being exhaustive books, written by a single author with the aim of settling the matter (the works by Walter Allen (1981) or John Bayley (1988) are excellent examples of its kind), the new trend collected the opinions of several experts in one same volume with the basic aim of promoting discussion on the short story. The book by the pioneering scholar in the academic field of the short story Charles E. May, The New Short Story Theories (1994), follows this pattern. It contains classic pieces by authors like Poe or Brander Matthews, together with contemporary texts by writers like Julio Cortazar or Nadine Gordimer. It deals with aspects of definition of the short story, together with historical considerations and