Middlebrow Magazines Research Articles

Itsuki Hiroyuki’s Farewell to Moscow Misfits and Entertainment Strategies: Middlebrow Novels, Jazz Novels, and Repatriates

This paper addresses writer Itsuki Hiroyuki’s 1966 debut novel Farewell to Moscow Misfits through the lens of middlebrow novels, jazz novels, and repatriates. This novel draws from Itsuki’s personal experience being repatriated from colonial Korea after the war and visiting the Soviet Union in the mid-1960s. Farewell was unique for its time in representing jazz, music, and youth “stilyagi” counterculture in the Soviet Union. This counterculture movement was roughly contemporaneous with the student movement of the 1960s in Japan. This period also saw the popularization of the “middlebrow novel”—an ambiguous term that was used to describe literature outside of the established pure/popular dichotomy. These amorphous “middlebrow” works allow us to read some of the cultural dynamics of the 1960s. Itsuki published many of his early works in so-called middlebrow magazines, not “pure” literary journals. Itsuki himself claimed that his works were neither pure literature nor popular literature; they were simply “entertainment”. He placed his works in relation to jazz, the circus, and enka. His unique views on cultural production and media emerged from his repatriation experiences and his encounter with Russian culture. This paper examines not only genre conventions in literature but also Itsuki’s objections to the pure/popular literary structure, as well as his place in cultural representations of the 1960s.

The Post-Colonial Magazine Archive

Indian magazines and print culture in general have been studied more thoroughly for the colonial period, but the 1950s–1970s have rightly been called the golden age of magazine culture. In Hindi literary lore, magazines loom large as the main platform for literature, where poets and fiction writers found readers and recognition and critics debated aesthetics and ideology. To borrow Amit Chaudhuri’s phrase, magazines were sites of intense ‘literary activism’: an activism by editors on behalf of literature to champion new writers and encourage readers’ tastes, but also a constant critical interrogation on the value and function of literature. Despite their ephemeral nature—particularly in the Hindi context where old books and periodicals tend to be sold in bulk as scrap paper—magazines embody, and capture for us eager after-readers, a lively community of readers and writers. This essay explores the multilingual ‘ecology’ of Hindi and English literary and middlebrow magazines, including Kahānī, Kalpanā, Sārikā, Saritā and Caravan.

Review

Review

Beyond Clichés and Satire: Expatriation and Modernism in a Middlebrow Novel, The French They are a Funny Race,

This article focuses on the discussion of expatriation and on the representations of modernism in a middlebrow novel, The French They are a Funny Race, by Lyon Mearson (1931), arguing that those two aspects are linked by a common critical perspective on distinction, understood as the feeling of superiority the expatriates and the modernists develop towards ordinary people. Using primary sources from the same time period, it first inscribes The French within those two literary and critical traditions, the expatriation novel on the one hand, and the discussion of modernism in middlebrow productions on the other hand. It then proceeds to show that the novel’s standpoint on expatriation and modernism is quite subtle, and noticeably less conservative and more open-minded than other expatriation novels and middlebrow magazines.

Personality, Impersonality, and the Personified Detachment of Wyndham Lewis

Personality, Impersonality, and the Personified Detachment of Wyndham Lewis Heather Arvidson (bio) Few words invoke the pieties of high modernist aesthetics with the force of "impersonality," which, since the early twentieth century, has served as shorthand for the fragmented forms, intellectual detachment, and imperious command of abstraction and allusion conventionally associated with modernism. Even as scholarship of recent decades, and the new modernist studies in particular, has dismantled any notion of a unified modernist aesthetic, privileged statements of the so-called doctrine of impersonality by T. S. Eliot and James Joyce continue to exert a grip on received understandings of modernism's formal investments. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919) supplies a formidable touchstone, presenting a cryptic "impersonal theory of poetry" imagined with all the austerity of scientific objectivity.1 Eliot claims that in acquiring an "historical sense" of aesthetic tradition, the artist undergoes "a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable," and hence submits to "a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality" ("Tradition," 102, 103). This formulation has come to stand more broadly for modernists' rejection of subjectivity as the expressive basis for art. Its institutionalization is not only a product of the New Criticism that championed Eliot's iconic severance of the artist from the art work but was—importantly for this article—well underway in the 1920s, as may attest Laura Riding's 1928 complaint of the "ritualistic impersonality" of emergent modernist orthodoxy.2 Less well known is that "impersonality" lived an equally vibrant discursive life outside of art in transatlantic print culture. [End Page 791] Coeval with modernism, elaborations on what was "impersonal" about modernity—in culture, science, industry, and human character—proliferated in newspapers, mass and middlebrow magazines, scientific periodicals, and works of sociology and political analysis. Equivocal in valence and remarkably catholic in semantic application, impersonality was both "in the air, part of the 'climate of opinion'" and resolutely in print, grafted to debates about the prospects of the individual within urban industrial life.3 As John Dewey put it, "the invasion of the community by the new and relatively impersonal and mechanical modes of combined human behavior is the outstanding fact of modern life."4 Yet impersonality at times bore a more sanguine aspect, as when Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy proclaimed that "to impersonalize scientifically the material sense of existence—rather than cling to personality—is the lesson of to-day," or when Bertrand Russell pronounced that "the desire for a larger life and wider interests, for an escape from private circumstances … is fulfilled by the impersonal cosmic outlook of science as by nothing else."5 As such examples suggest, impersonality and its cognates accommodated meanings that ranged from a pervasive hazard for personhood, emotion, and intimate connection to an interpersonal or scientific ideal; from urban alienation to collective affiliation; from the machine to mythic consciousness; from subpersonal matter to the transpersonal soul. In short, what cultural historian Warren I. Susman has famously called "the culture of personality" was deeply entangled with a culture of impersonality, and it was within this broader context that modernist impersonality acquired its durable correlation with modernist aesthetics.6 No one was more alert to the enmeshment of personality and impersonality, or more convinced of the debt modernism owed to this discursive background, than Wyndham Lewis. In addition to the roles for which he is best known—novelist, painter, critic, polemicist, and Enemy-at-large—Lewis also served as modernist impersonality's reverse engineer. As part of an impossibly vast project to "lay bare the widely-flung system of cables connecting up this maze-like and destructive system in the midst of which we live," he sought to diagram the ideological workings of the interwar status quo of British and American culture.7 In the process, he seized impersonality as a key hermeneutic. In defense of the allegedly persecuted "Person" of Western culture, Lewis's immense critical output of the second half of the 1920s and early 1930s reiteratively attempted to dismantle the "rationale" that impersonality "possess[es] today."8 Lewis recasts impersonality as a key narrative of the era—and one on...

Ernest Haycox and the Western by Richard W. Etulain

Reviewed by: Ernest Haycox and the Western by Richard W. Etulain Daniel Worden Richard W. Etulain, Ernest Haycox and the Western. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 2017. 200 pp. Cloth, $29.95. A productive author of Western fiction, Ernest Haycox wrote twenty-four novels and over two hundred short stories. Most notably for scholars of Western American literature and film today, Haycox's 1937 story "Stage to Lordsburg" was adapted into John Ford's landmark 1939 film Stagecoach. In his engaging biographical study, Richard W. Etulain chronicles Haycox's career as a Western writer, from his prolific work for pulp magazines to his later interest in breaking out of the Western formula he helped to define. In so doing, Etulain offers not only a valuable study of Haycox and his [End Page 261] work but also a model for how neglected Western writers can be approached as both literary figures and laborers within a publishing industry that thrived on the Western genre. Etulain's book begins with a brief account of the Western genre's emergence, from frontier narratives and Cooper's Leatherstocking saga to the Western genre's solidification into "something of a morality play" by the first decades of the twentieth century (18). This sets the scene for Haycox's entrance into literary culture in the 1920s, when he devotes himself to "learning and practicing the formula of the Western" that had become ubiquitous in pulp and middlebrow magazines (19). After establishing the literary context Haycox would encounter as an adult, Etulain then tells Haycox's life story, from his birth in Portland, Oregon, to a family that struggled financially and moved around a great deal, to high school, and to service overseas during World War I. Attending college first at Reed, then at the University of Oregon, Haycox wrote for campus newspapers, and in so doing, Etulain notes, Haycox would begin to articulate his worldview: "He held that one should be independent in beliefs and actions but not to such an extent as to isolate one's self from society" (34). This perspective has a clear affinity with the Western genre, in which isolated individual Westerners are often compelled to act heroically, in the interests of a larger good. In a brief foray into Haycox's politics, Etulain also remarks that Haycox's worldview would reach beyond his fiction writing and "helps explain why Haycox stood against Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal and became a strong advocate of conservative Republicanism in the 1930s and 1940s" (34). This is a rare gesture in the book to the broader social and political currents that surrounded Haycox and the Western in the twentieth century. The book's major focus is on the development of Haycox's literary career, from his short stories and serialized novels in pulp magazines such as Western Story Magazine, his later publications in the more prestigious and better paying Collier's, and his novels. Etulain details Haycox's vision of writing, which differs from more romantic conceptions of the profession, noting that "Haycox considered himself more of a craftsman than an artist. He was convinced that writing could be compared with plumbing, [End Page 262] carpentering, or any other such skill" (71). Gradually, Haycox began to depart from the Western genre formulas he honed in the pulps, perhaps most notably in his 1944 historical novel about the Battle of Little Big Horn, Bugles in the Afternoon. He would continue this focus on history, instead of formula, with the posthumously published The Earthbreakers in 1952. In this novel, Etulain sees evidence of a broader conception of novelistic form, a more complex representation of character, and a nuanced engagement with history. Unfortunately, Haycox would not complete the trilogy that The Earthbreakers was supposed to begin. Ernest Haycox and the Western portrays the life of a working Western writer, devoted to craft and the market yet not without literary ambitions. In the book's epilogue, Etulain reflects on Haycox's place, or lack thereof, in the canon of Western American literature and whether we should think of Haycox among genre writers like Max Brand, Zane Grey, and Louis L'Amour or among more "literary" figures such as Walter...

Mainstreaming the Avant-Garde: Modernism in <i>Life</i> Magazine (New York, 1883–1936)

This paper explores the relationship between literary modernism and mainstream culture within a little-studied American magazine, Life (New York, 1884-1936). It does so by looking at three ways in which Life presented modernism to its readers: by quoting modernist writing, and, above all, by satirizing modernist art, and by offering didactic explanations of modernist art and literature. By reconsidering some of the long-established divisions between high and low culture, and between ‘little’ and ‘bigger’ magazines, this paper contributes to a better understanding of what modernism was and meant. It also suggests that the double agenda observed in Life – both satirical and didactic – might be a way of defining middlebrow magazines.

‘We Have Certainly Saved Ourselves’: Popular Views of Masculinity during the Korean War, 1950–53

This article addresses the ways in which the American popular media, particularly middle-brow magazines, novels, and films, created a gendered interpretation of the Korean War. On the US home front, cultural commentators linked the purported 1950s crisis of masculinity to concerns that “coddled” and “overmothered” American military personnel would lack the manly vigor necessary to prevent South Korea from falling to communist forces. Ultimately, though, most of these observers insisted that in the crucible of war lay an antidote for America’s flagging masculine spirit. The so-called “police action” served as a critical terrain — both real and imagined — for debating masculinity during the Cold War. Although such optimism proved short-lived, this martial vision for boosting manliness resonated in post-war US policy and culture well beyond the three short years of the conflict.

Remediation as reading: digitising The Western Home Monthly

This paper serves as a report from the field in the midst of the collaborative digitisation of The Western Home Monthly (1899–1932), a Winnipeg-based middlebrow magazine. It reflects on the methodological and theoretical challenges that face periodical scholars and on how those challenges are sometimes addressed and sometimes exacerbated by digitisation. Most importantly, it explores the unique reading perspective afforded by the process of digitising an archive, and asks how this process might help to develop new methodologies for reading periodicals that are more attentive to the media-specificity of the middlebrow magazine.

Martha Ostenso, Periodical Culture, and the Middlebrow

Between 1938 and 1942, border-crossing Norwegian-Canadian author Martha Ostenso published three short stories in Chatelaine magazine, stories that engage in complex ways with themes of femininity, nationalism, and consumerism. In this article, we consider how the context of Chatelaine shapes and complicates readings of these stories by placing the stories in conversation with surrounding material, including advertisements and editorial content. The fiction, we argue, unsettles romantic tropes and nationalist rhetoric, and contests the correlation between the attainment of happiness and the acceptance of class and gender norms. In examining authorial identity, textual complexity, and print cultural contexts, we show how middlebrow magazines are a vibrant means of understanding middle-class culture’s anxieties and aspirations.

Goedkoop, Groot, Geïllustreerd - Literatuurkritiek en publieksbemiddeling in Morks’ Magazijn (1910-1942) en “Zij”: Maandblad voor de vrouw (1916-1942)

This article discusses the background, content, mission statements and key contributors of the illustrated magazines Morks’ Magazijn and “Zij”: Maandblad voor de vrouw, both of which sought to make art, science and literature available to a wide reading public. By employing recent conceptualisations of so-called middlebrow magazines and their specific modes of criticism, this article provides an in-depth view of how popular periodicals could shape (and position themselves within) the public sphere at the beginning of the twentieth century and of the role that cultural mediation and literary criticism played in this process.

F. Scott Fitzgerald in Context

F. Scott Fitzgerald in Context

Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker ‘In Broadway Playhouses’: Middlebrow Theatricality and Sophisticated Humour

This essay proposes that humorists Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker cast the middlebrow professional as a modern performer in their drama reviews and fiction. Under the sign of sophistication, their work champions individual identity and social status based on professionalism, public performance, and wit. The article traces sophistication as an ideal on the Broadway stage of the 1920s and 1930s, analyzes the skeptical personae that Benchley and Barker create in their drama reviews for middlebrow magazines, and follows the trope of performance (monologue, song, stage) in fiction by Benchley and Parker. In their drama reviews, Benchley and Parker reclaim the tonal extremes of modernist drama for the alienated middle-class professional, and they insist that even artistic avant-gardes derive their techniques from low-cultural spectacle and mass media people-pleasing. In so doing, they encouraged their readers to view themselves as consumers and producers of modern performances. In their fiction, Benchley and Parker use the roles of the beleaguered businessman and the world-weary divorcée to advocate social mobility, professional independence, and hedonistic choice over self-abnegating duty.

Finding fault: Aborigines, anthropologists, popular writers andWalkabout

The popular middlebrow magazine Walkabout was published between 1934 and 1974. Its principle aim was to promote travel to and within Australia and to educate Australians about their continent. It aspired to be an Australian geographic magazine, and to this end it focussed on inland and remote Australia, and natural history. For this reason, and because it was published throughout a period, particularly in the early decades, when only those Aborigines living afar from populated regions were recognised as Aborigines, many of Walkabout's articles were about Aborigines or, more commonly, made mention of them. There are very few critiques of Walkabout, but those that do exist are critical of its portrayal of Aborigines. Notwithstanding that there are many reasons to find fault, it is possible to read this material in a more salutary light, even against the apparent intention of at least one of the contributors, Ernestine Hill. This article considers the work of a number of popular writers and two of the anthro...

From Vernacular Humor to Middlebrow Modernism: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and the Creation of Literary Value

From Vernacular Humor to Middlebrow Modernism: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and the Creation of Literary Value Daniel Tracy (bio) So then we saw a jewelry store and we saw some jewelry in the window and it really seemed to be a very very great bargain but the price marks all had francs on them and Dorothy and I do not seem to be mathematical enough to tell how much francs is in money. —Lorelei Lee, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes When the editors of Harper’s Bazar published Anita Loos’s serial novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes over six months in 1925, they were asking a question that parallels, in terms of aesthetic value, Lorelei’s more humorous problem with money: how much modernism is in literature and art?1 How do you begin to acknowledge it, and thus reap the rewards of knowing it? How do you make modernism pay, not for experimental writers themselves but for Harper’s Bazar readers? Frankly hostile to experimental literature and art in the nineteen teens, the magazine had only recently, with hesitation, begun to treat aesthetic modernism as potentially legitimate as high culture. In the nineteen teens, while the more modernist-friendly Vanity Fair’s art reviews tried to accommodate the aesthetic visions of both modernists and their antagonists in the Academy of Arts and Design, Harper’s Bazar printed an anti-modernist screed by the Academy’s secretary.2 In addition, a regular columnist known as “The Bachelor” frequently found time to deride experimentation in art as so much rubbish. In the early twenties, Bazar writers just began treating modernism as something their readers [End Page 115] might need to know about in a more-than-dismissive fashion.3 One article examining expressionist drama noted, noncommittally, “One approves or disapproves—and vigorously, too,” which suggests the ambivalence over taking a clear position on modernism that haunted the magazine (Hatton and Hatton). As most critics of Loos’s novel have noted, the obsession with refinement as cultural capital drives both the plot of Blondes and its publication in a middlebrow magazine—that is, one devoted to teaching its readers the contents of high culture (Rubin, Radway). The heroine of Blondes, Lorelei Lee, pursues men, and more importantly their money, by convincing others and herself that she is “refined,” a state that begins as intellectual and literary, but ends up moral (she marries a “Prespyterian” censor [77]). While late in Blondes Lorelei proves herself to her future husband by pretending to reform her friend Dorothy, in earlier chapters she reads (that is, she has her maid read) novels and biographies and embarks on a career as an “authoress” by beginning her diary, all to impress the men around her who financially support her for the purpose—they claim and she accepts—of educating her (4). So when Lorelei writes that she does not know “how much francs is in money,” she is both humorous in her misunderstanding and revealing of her nonrecognition of national difference, and both of those undercut her claims to the cultural capital she wishes to exchange by writing about her experience (far more so than not actually knowing the franc to dollar conversion rate). And the Ralph Barton illustration accompanying this passage ironizes her textual representation yet further by calling into question Lorelei’s claim that Dorothy shares her problem—while a confused Lorelei holds out a limp, crumpled franc note to the jeweler as if it were a piece of trash from the floor, Dorothy looks at her with a wide-eyed smile of amusement. To turn Lorelei’s verbal dross into the gold of real sophistication, Loos adds layers of irony to Lorelei’s narration and Barton adds visual commentary that often enhances the identification of the reader with Dorothy rather than the heroine. Harper’s Bazar readers capitalize on Lorelei’s mistakes, then, by recognizing in themselves the valued culture that she lacks even as they might enjoy her ability to take advantage of men—a split in the novel’s tone I discuss as a key effect of its appropriation of nineteenth-century vernacular humor. [End Page 116] Yet the dilemma faced by Bazar’s editors, I think, ought...

Montana 1948 by Larry Watson

Reviews 387 Main Street: The Revolt of Carol Kennicott. By Martin Bucco. (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993. 144 pages, $22.95/$7.95.) Martin Bucco’sanalysis ofSinclair Lewis’s 1920 best-seller-turned-classic is a welcome revaluation of a work—and an author—that are returning to literary prominence after a period of relative neglect. When Main Street was published in 1920, Alfred Harcourt hoped for respectable sales. Lewis was then the author of one boys’ book, five modest novels, and a series of popular ifshallow short stories in middlebrow magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post. What Harcourt got instead was a novel that sold out as soon as it arrived in book stores, a book that pleased readers from small-town housewives to H. L. Mencken. Lewis’s reputation declined after he won the Nobel Prize in 1930, and it dropped again with the publication ofMark Schorer’s thorough but derogatory biography in 1961. But Main Street stubbornly remained in print. Now, with its republication in the Library of America series, new readers will discover Lewis and Main Street. Martin Bucco’s study is a good guide to neophytes reading Lewis for the first time. A new generation that knows nothing of small town life or of American life in general during the period before, during, and immediately after World War 1, that knows little of Lewis’s dominant position in the literary world of the 1920s will be well served by this book. But even the devoted student ofLewis will learn much from Bucco’s study. IfHemingwaywas faulted by Gertrude Stein as “smelling of libraries,”Lewis has often been seen as a popular rather than a literary writer. Bucco is careful to point out literary sources and parallels ranging from Dickens and H. G. Wells, whose influence has been pointed out before, to less obvious literary colleagues such as T. S. Eliot. In his attempt to impose order on an admittedly episodic book, Bucco divides the novel into seven sections, to each of which he devotes a chapter— “Prairie Princess,”“Carol D’Arc,”etc.—each having its own theme. While this is a helpful technique, it sometimes seems that more order is imposed on the material than inherently exists. On the whole, however, this is a fine aid for beginner and Lewis enthusiast alike. ROBERT E. FLEMING University ofNew Mexico Montana 1948. By Larry Watson. (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 1993. 175 pages, $17.95.) I was reminded, while reading this novel, ofVirginia Woolfscomment that “life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.”There is a luminous, elegiac quality to 588 WesternAmerican Literature the first-person narration of David Hayden, now a high-school history teacher, as he recalls events forty years earlier when he was a reticent, socially awkward boy oftwelve in a small town in windswept northeastern Montana, where, “ifthe land had its way, nothing would grow taller than sagebrush and buffalo grass.” The family housekeeper, a Hunkpapa Sioux named Marie Little Soldier, falls ill and then dies under suspicious circumstances. But not before we discover that David’s Uncle Frank—the town doctor and a handsome, deco­ rated war hero, “witty, charming, [and] at smiling ease with his life”—has been sexually molesting Indian women. David’s father, Wes, like his father before him, is the sheriff, though he doesn’t fit the image of a Montanan lawman. He wears brogans and afedora, not boots and a Stetson, and he keeps the respect of the boys in town during the war by fingerprinting them in his office. His gun is a tiny Italian-made .32 automatic that “looked more like a toy than the westernstyle cap guns that had been my toys,”David remembers. Wes arrests his brother Frank, but in an awkward attempt to keep matters quiet he locks him in the basement of their house instead of the townjail. The rest of Watson’s story explores the consequences of that arrest: the moral dilemma of a family torn betweenjustice and loyalty, racism, and family pride. Watson revises a romanticized western past of sunburned individualism. Yet he does so not with postmodern levity...

Main Street: The Revolt of Carol Kennicott by Martin Bucco

Reviews 387 Main Street: The Revolt of Carol Kennicott. By Martin Bucco. (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993. 144 pages, $22.95/$7.95.) Martin Bucco’sanalysis ofSinclair Lewis’s 1920 best-seller-turned-classic is a welcome revaluation of a work—and an author—that are returning to literary prominence after a period of relative neglect. When Main Street was published in 1920, Alfred Harcourt hoped for respectable sales. Lewis was then the author of one boys’ book, five modest novels, and a series of popular ifshallow short stories in middlebrow magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post. What Harcourt got instead was a novel that sold out as soon as it arrived in book stores, a book that pleased readers from small-town housewives to H. L. Mencken. Lewis’s reputation declined after he won the Nobel Prize in 1930, and it dropped again with the publication ofMark Schorer’s thorough but derogatory biography in 1961. But Main Street stubbornly remained in print. Now, with its republication in the Library of America series, new readers will discover Lewis and Main Street. Martin Bucco’s study is a good guide to neophytes reading Lewis for the first time. A new generation that knows nothing of small town life or of American life in general during the period before, during, and immediately after World War 1, that knows little of Lewis’s dominant position in the literary world of the 1920s will be well served by this book. But even the devoted student ofLewis will learn much from Bucco’s study. IfHemingwaywas faulted by Gertrude Stein as “smelling of libraries,”Lewis has often been seen as a popular rather than a literary writer. Bucco is careful to point out literary sources and parallels ranging from Dickens and H. G. Wells, whose influence has been pointed out before, to less obvious literary colleagues such as T. S. Eliot. In his attempt to impose order on an admittedly episodic book, Bucco divides the novel into seven sections, to each of which he devotes a chapter— “Prairie Princess,”“Carol D’Arc,”etc.—each having its own theme. While this is a helpful technique, it sometimes seems that more order is imposed on the material than inherently exists. On the whole, however, this is a fine aid for beginner and Lewis enthusiast alike. ROBERT E. FLEMING University ofNew Mexico Montana 1948. By Larry Watson. (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 1993. 175 pages, $17.95.) I was reminded, while reading this novel, ofVirginia Woolfscomment that “life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.”There is a luminous, elegiac quality to ...

Trollope as a Short Story Writer

A NTHONY TROLLOPE'S stories constitute a substantial and substantially ignored portion of his prodigious output. He began writing them after having established, in his mid-forties, a reputation as author of the first three Barsetshire novels; and with the great success of Framley Parsonage in 1860, editors of Victorian middlebrow magazines began to importune him for short works bearing his name. To his young American friend, Kate Field, who had sent him one of her short stories for criticism, Trollope offered a formula for storytelling which demonstrates how modestly he may have regarded his own practice, at least in the beginning stages: Tell some simple plot or story of more or less involved, but still common life, adventure, and try first to tell that in such form that idle minds may find some gentle sentiment and recreation in your work.' Such a goal indicates why so many of his stories, virtually all of them pleasant enough to read through, are not comparable to the more ambitious, more painstakingly constructed, efforts of James and Kipling, Lawrence and Joyce. Like Mrs. Gaskell and Dickens, Trollope was perfectly willing to produce slight works of an anecdotal or inspirational nature. Like them, however, he was also capable of works of great power or delicacy. Malachi's Cove and The Spotted Dog are masterpieces of the Victorian short story form; and even when Trollope is not at his best, he does provide us with aspects of his art and personality-in the forms of a humorous self-portrait, or a somber display of his view of human nature, or a rare glimpse of his creative process at work-that are usually missing from the novels themselves.