Story

Abstract

The past decade has witnessed a surge of popular and scholarly interest in short stories focused on the family, and particularly on the mother-daughter dyad within that family. One of the earliest anthologies of mother-daughter short stories appeared in 1985, edited by literary scholar Susan Koppelman, and focused on the ties that bind mothers and daughters over many generations; two more collections on similar themes followed over the next six years.1 Books about the mother-daughter dyad in literature also appeared during the 1980s;2 by 1993, Susanne Carter had compiled an annotated bibliography devoted to American stories about mothers and daughters. Although scholarly attention to the topic gradually emerged, popular appeal did not immediately follow. Over the next three years, just three more collections of stories were published.3 Beginning in 1998, however, publications of mother-daughter anthologies grew dramatically: six more collections were published in a three-year span.4 While some of these collections also include poems and excerpts from longer fiction, the short story is the predominant genre in the anthologies. And although father-son story collections exist, they are considerably outnumbered.5 Stories of mothers and daughters are apparently more attractive to publishers.6 KeywordsShort StoryKnowledge ClaimOral TraditionCultural WorkWoman WriterThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.