Women Writers

Abstract

Women in virtually every country in the world are writing short stories. But this is not necessarily reflected in the academy or even, fully, in publishing. In many North American degree programmes, there are survey courses on the short story, but there are relatively few university courses on the short story in the United Kingdom. Courses on the short story by women writers are even scarcer. Anthologies, some consisting only of women writers, and collections of short stories by specific women writers are included on modules that are thematic, period based or author based such as modern writing, women’s writing, crime writing, African American literature, Irish literature, postcolonial writing, lesbian and gay literature and so forth. Most creative writing programmes provide students with the opportunity to explore the short story from the practitioner’s point of view and many of these require students to study examples of the form. But outside of the limited critical, reflective practice which these courses provide, few degree programmes offer literature students the space to reflect upon the short story as a genre, let alone the way that the genre has been developed by women. The knowledge of the short story, and certainly of the short story by women writers, which most students will take from their literary studies will have been put together piecemeal from a range of modules where stories were included among the set texts.KeywordsShort StoryIrish WomanSexual PrejudiceWoman WriterWave FeminismThese 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.