The short story was the most profitable literary form for most fiction-writers of
the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries because it was quick to write, relative to
novels, marketable to a wide variety of periodicals, and able to be re-sold, in groups, for
book collections. While the majority of writers composed short fiction within
conventional modes and genres and published collections rarely exhibiting more than a
superficial coherence of setting or character, modernist authors found in the form’s
brevity helpful restrictions on their stylistic and narrative experiments, and, in the short
story collection, an opportunity to create book-length works exhibiting new, modern
kinds of coherence.
This dissertation examines four modernists' experiences writing short stories and
publishing them in periodicals and books: Henry James in The Yellow Book and
Terminations (Heinemann, 1895); Joseph Conrad in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine
and Youth: A Narrative; and Two Other Stories (Blackwood, 1902); James Joyce in The
Irish Homestead and Dubliners (Grant Richards, 1914); and Virginia Woolf in Monday or
Tuesday (Hogarth, 1921). For these writers, the production of short fiction within the
literary marketplace had definite and important consequences on their texts as well as the
formation of their mature authorial identities. (With the exception of James, I focus on
the early, most impressionable periods of the writers’ careers.) In bucking the commercial
trend of miscellaneous collections, the unified book of stories came to represent, for such
artists, something of a bibliographic rebellion, which, because of its inherent formal
fragmentation, proved a compelling and fruitful site for their exploration of modernist
themes and styles.
The conclusion explores some of the consequences of these experiences on the
writers’ subsequent, longer texts—Lord Jim, Ulysses, and Jacob's Room—arguing that
such so-called “novels” can be understood better if studied within the literary and
professional contexts created by their authors’ engagements with the short story. The
same is true of the “short story cycle,” “sequence,” and “composite,” as strongly-coherent
books of stories have been termed variously by scholars. This dissertation, particularly its
introduction, sets out to provide historical, material background for scholarship on this
too-long neglected literary genre. / text
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UTEXAS/oai:repositories.lib.utexas.edu:2152/ETD-UT-2012-08-6327 |
| Date | 12 October 2012 |
| Creators | Zacks, Aaron Shanohn |
| Source Sets | University of Texas |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | thesis |
| Format | application/pdf |
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