THE SHORT STORY: AN OVERVIEW OF THE HISTORY AND EVOLUTION OF THE GENRE

Abstract

A story is way to say something that can't be said any other way, and it takes every word in story to say what meaning is. You tell story because statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what story is about, only proper thing is to tell him to read story. meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning, and purpose of making statements about meaning of story is only to help you to experience that meaning more fully.1Theory and history of formAs early as 1937 Elizabeth Bowen claimed, The story is young art ... child of this century, which developed at same time as cinema and photography.2 According to Mary Rohrberger, one of first theorizers of genre, short narrative fiction is as old as history of literature .... But story, as we know it today, is newest of literary genres.3The origins of form go back to myth and biblical verse narratives, medieval sermons and romance, fables, folktales, ballads and rise of German Gothic in eighteenth century. But its mythic origins, filtered through Romantic influence, had to come to terms with conventions of mimesis and vraisemblance of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century realism.4 Charles May observes that the story has from its beginning been hybrid form combining both metaphoric mode of old romance and metonymie mode of new realism.5Although story constitutes form in its own right, it has suffered theoretical neglect in comparison with other genres such as poetry, drama, epic, or novel. As May argues, a genre only truly comes into being when conventions that constitute it are articulated within larger conceptual context of literature as whole.6 In case of story this was long-deferred process. Until half century ago those who theorized about genre were not literary critics but practitioners of form themselves: Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville and Anton Chekhov in nineteenth century; and Henry James, Flannery O'Connor, Julio Cortazar and Eudora Welty, among others, in twentieth. But interest in story has been growing continuously since Sixties; critical and theoretical studies of form have been flourishing since last decades of twentieth century.Poe' s critical comments towards middle of nineteenth century are responsible for birth of story as unique genre.7 As first story theorist, he brought into discussion issues of form, style, length, design, authorial goals, and reader affect, developing framework within which story is discussed even today. Evaluating status of story as genre, he ranked it very high in pantheon of arts, second only to lyric form. His major contribution was to invest story with tension and thus to impregnate it with defining attributes of poetry. Its compact and unified form, which it shares with lyric, allows story to achieve effects unattainable in novel. He also observed that its brevity and intensity created strong undercurrent of suggestion.8 Poe was first to consider endings as crucial elements in compositional strategies and defined story in terms of reading experience.A traditional view of story is that it is compressed, unified, and plotted form. Theoretical discussions of genre explore notions such as totality, brevity, intensity, suggestiveness, unity of effect, closure, and design. Attention to formal structure of story is mainly twentieth-century critical enterprise. aesthetics of genre's form attracted interest of critics and narrative theorists in Sixties - period of international dissemination of Russian Formalist writings of 1920s (Boris Ejxenbaum, Viktor Shklovsky), emergence of structuralism (Vladimir Propp) and anthropology (Claude Levi-Strauss), and philosophy of culture (Ernest Cassirer). …