The Cambridge History of the English Short Story

The Cambridge History of the English Short Story is the first comprehensive volume to capture the literary history of the English short story. Charting the origins and generic evolution of the English short story to the present day, and written by international experts in the field, this book covers numerous transnational and historical connections between writers, modes and forms of transmission. Suitable for English literature students and scholars of the English short story generally, it will become a standard work of reference in its field.

List of contributors; Acknowledgements; Introduction Dominic Head; 1. Early modern diversity: the origins of English short fiction Barbara Korte; 2. Short prose narratives of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Donald J. Newman; 3. Gothic and Victorian supernatural tales Jessica Cox; 4. The Victorian potboiler: novelists writing short stories Sophie Gilmartin; 5. Fable, myth and folktale: the writing of oral and traditional story forms Andrew Harrison; 6. The colonial short story, adventure and the exotic Robert Hampson; 7. The Yellow Book circle and the culture of the literary magazine Winnie Chan; 8. The modernist short story: fractured perspectives Claire Drewery; 9. War stories: the short story in World Wars I and II Ann-Marie Einhaus; 10. The short story in Ireland to 1945: a national literature Heather Ingman; 11. The short story in Ireland since 1945: a modernizing tradition Heather Ingman; 12. The short story in Scotland: from oral tale to dialectal style Timothy C. Baker; 13. The short story in Wales: cultivated regionalism Jane Aaron; 14. The understated art, English style Dean Baldwin; 15. The rural tradition in the English short story Dominic Head; 16. Metropolitan modernity: stories of London Neal Alexander; 17. Gender and genre: short fiction, feminism and female experience Sabine Coelsch-Foisner; 18. Queer short stories: an inverted history Brett Josef Grubisic and Carellin Brooks; 19. Stories of Jewish identity: survivors, exiles and cosmopolitans Axel Stähler; 20. New voices: multicultural short stories Abigail Ward; 21. Settler stories: postcolonial short fiction Victoria Kuttainen; 22. After Empire: postcolonial short fiction and the oral tradition John Thieme; 23. Ghost stories and supernatural tales Ruth Robbins; 24. The detective story: order from chaos Andrew Maunder; 25. Frontiers: science fiction and the British marketplace Paul March-Russell; 26. Weird stories: the potency of horror and fantasy Roger Luckhurst; 27. Experimentalism: self-reflexive and postmodernist stories David James; 28. Satirical stories: estrangement and social critique Sandie Byrne; 29. Comedic short fiction Richard Bradford; 30. Short story cycles: between the novel and the story collection Gerald Lynch; 31. The novella: between the novel and the story Gerri Kimber; 32. The short story visualized: adaptations and screenplays Linda Costanzo Cahir; 33. The short story anthology: shaping the canon Lynda Prescott; 34. The institution of creative writing Ailsa Cox; 35. Short story futures Julian Murphet; Bibliography; Index.

Dominic Head is Professor of Modern English Literature at the University of Nottingham, where he served as Head of School from 2007–10. He has written extensively on forms of literature and is author of The Modernist Short Story (Cambridge, 1992) and The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction, 1950–2000 (Cambridge, 2002), and editor of The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English, 3rd edition (Cambridge, 2006).