Origin of short story
Origins. The evolution of the short story first began before humans could write. … Consequently, many of the oldest narratives in the world, such as the ancient Babylonian tale the Epic of Gilgamesh, are in verse.
The earliest versions of the American short story can be traced back to Germany where writers such Heinrich von Kleist, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Ludwig Tieck were popularizing a hybrid narrative art form that combined the sketch and the tale
Guy de Maupassant
Biography of Guy de Maupassant, Father of the Short Story. Esther Lombardi, M.A., is a journalist who has covered books and literature for over twenty years
EVOLUTION OF GENRE:
Genre is a style or category of art, music, or literature. As an author, genre controls what you write and how you write it. It describes the style and focus of the novel you write. Genres give you blueprints for different types of stories.Jan 15, 2016
Books form a genre when, according to their readers, they contain a sufficient number of similar words to take them together as a group in contrast to books that do not have a sufficient number of those similar words. … The way in which the words are distributed over books may indicate their genre– specific value.
The earliest recorded systems of genre in Western history can be traced back to Plato and Aristotle. Gérard Genette, a French literary theorist author of The Architext, describes Plato as creating three Imitational genres: dramatic dialogue, pure narrative, and epic (a mixture of dialogue and narrative).
ENGLISH SHORT STORY WRITERS:
1 .Anton Chekhov. Chekhov wrote from every point of view: men, women, old, young, and rich, poor. ..
2. Katherine Mansfield. Her stories are very mysterious to me. …
3. Isaac Babel. Babel was a master of compression. …
4. Mavis Gallant. She is just a consummate stylist. …
5. John Cheever. …
6, James Baldwin. …
7. Deborah Eisenberg. …
8. Roberto Bolaño.
Anton Chekhov
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a Russian playwright and short-story writer who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short fiction in history. His career as a playwright produced four classics, and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics.
Chekhov had at first written stories to earn money, but as his artistic ambition grew, he made formal innovations which have influenced the evolution of the modern short story
Katherine Mansfield
Kathleen Mansfield Murry 14 October 1888 – 9 January 1923) was a prominent modernist writer who was born and brought up in New Zealand. She wrote short stories and poetry under the pen name Katherine Mansfield. When she was 19, she left colonial New Zealand and settled in England, where she became a friend of D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Ottoline Morrell and others in the orbit of the Bloomsbury Group. Mansfield was diagnosed with extrapulmonary tuberculosis in 1917 and she died in France aged 34.
Isaac Babel
Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel (Russian: 13 July 1 July] 1894 – 27 January 1940) was a Russian writer, journalist, playwright, and literary translator. He is best known as the author of Red Cavalry, Story of My Dovecote and The Odessa Tales—stories from the life of Jewish gangsters from Odessa led by Benya Krik (prototype – Mishka Yaponchik. He has been acclaimed as “the greatest prose writer of Russian Jewry”. Babel was arrested by the NKVD on 15 May 1939 on fabricated charges of terrorism and espionage, and executed on 27 January 1940.
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Mavis Gallant
Mavis Leslie de Trafford Gallant, CC, née Young (11 August 1922 – 18 February 2014), was a Canadian writer who spent much of her life and career in France. Best known as a short story writer, she also published novels, plays and essays.
John Cheever
John William Cheever (May 27, 1912 – June 18, 1982) was an American novelist and short story writer. He is sometimes called “the Chekhov of the suburbs. “His fiction is mostly set in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the Westchester suburbs, old New England villages based on various South Shore towns around Quincy, Massachusetts, where he was born, and Italy, especially Rome. His short stories included “The Enormous Radio“, “Goodbye, My Brother”, “The Five-Forty-Eight“, “The Country Husband”, and “The Swimmer“, and he also wrote four novels, comprising The Wapshot Chronicle (National Book Award, 1958), The Wapshot Scandal (William Dean Howells Medal, 1965), Bullet Park (1969), Falconer (1977) and a novella Oh What a Paradise It Seems (1982).
James Baldwin
James Arthur Baldwin (August 2, 1924 – December 1, 1987) was an American novelist, playwright, essayist, poet, and activist. His essays, as collected in Notes of a Native Son (1955), explore intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western society, most notably in regard to the mid-twentieth-century United States. Some of Baldwin’s essays are book-length, including The Fire Next Time (1963), No Name in the Street (1972), and The Devil Finds Work (1976). An unfinished manuscript, Remember This House, was expanded and adapted for cinema as the Academy Award–nominated documentary film I Am Not Your Negro (2016). One of his novels, If Beale Street Could Talk, was adapted into an Academy-Award-winning dramatic film of the same name in 2018, directed and produced by Barry Jenkins.
Deborah Eisenberg
Eisenberg was born in Winnetka, Illinois. Her family was Jewish.[2] She grew up in suburban Chicago, Illinois, and moved to New York City in the late 1960s. Eisenberg has written five collections of stories: Transactions in a Foreign Currency (1986), Under the 82nd Airborne (1992), All Around Atlantis (1997), Twilight of the Superheroes (2006), and Your Duck Is My Duck (2018). Ben Marcus, reviewing Twilight of the Superheroes for The New York Times Book Review, called Eisenberg “one of the most important fiction writers now at work. This work is great.”[6] Her first two story collections were republished in one volume as The Work (So Far) of Deborah Eisenberg (1997).[7] Her first four collections were subsequently reprinted in The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (2010).[8]
Roberto Bolaño
Roberto Bolaño Ávalos (Spanish: [roˈβeɾto βoˈlaɲo ˈaβalos] ( listen); 28 April 1953 – 15 July 2003) was a Chilean novelist, short-story writer, poet and essayist. In 1999, Bolaño won the Rómulo Gallegos Prize for his novel Los detectives salvajes (The Savage Detectives), and in 2008 he was posthumously awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for his novel 2666, which was described by board member Marcela Valdes as a “work so rich and dazzling that it will surely draw readers and scholars for ages”.[1] The New York Times described him as “the most significant Latin American literary voice of his generation”
RESOUCE BRITANNICA:
The short story is usually concerned with a single effect conveyed in only one or a few significant episodes or scenes. The form encourages economy of setting, concise narrative, and the omission of a complex plot; character is disclosed in action and dramatic encounter but is seldom fully developed. Despite its relatively limited scope, though, a short story is often judged by its ability to provide a “complete” or satisfying treatment of its characters and subject.
Before the 19th century the short story was not generally regarded as a distinct literary form. But although in this sense it may seem to be a uniquely modern genre, the fact is that short prose fiction is nearly as old as language itself. Throughout history humankind has enjoyed various types of brief narratives: jests, anecdotes, studied digressions, short allegorical romances, moralizing fairy tales, short myths, and abbreviated historical legends. None of these constitutes a short story as it has been defined since the 19th century, but they do make up a large part of the milieu from which the modern short story emerged.
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