The Classic Short Story, 1870-1925: Theory of a Genre
Florence Goyet
Literature & Fiction
The Classic Short Story, 1870-1925: Theory of a Genre
Free
Description
Contents
Reviews


I enjoyed reading Florence Goyet's book. I recommend it to you for its breadth and insight.



— Charles E. May, 29 April 2014, review available on Prof. May's blog, at http://may-on-the-short-story.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/florence-goyet-classic-short-story-1870.html



 



Florence Goyet's book is remarkable as much for the scope of its corpus (more than a thousand stories in five languages) as for the quality of its analysis. The author defines the short story first by examining its narrative strategies, then by focusing on its print circulation and finally on how the text shapes its own reading. Goyet refines the distinctive features ordinarily accepted by the critics; she then shows that the readers of short stories are always different from the characters depicted, through the specific periodicals in which they are published. This is why the "peasant” stories of Maupassant appear in high society periodicals, and why the "European” stories of Henry James are published in the US, whereas his "American” ones are accepted in English magazines. The primary aim of the genre is to emphasize the picturesqueness of subjects which are a familiar sight for the readers yet in reality strange, because the characters live in another world altogether. Close analysis of this context in which the stories are published leads Goyet to define the genre as "monological” — being at odds with polyphony — a thesis which is confirmed in her subsequent analyses of the stylistic procedures that discredit the characters. Thus, this book provides us with a new understanding of the short text, which is all the more convincing in that it is always rigorously supported by probing theoretical discussions and by precise textual analyses.



— Denis Pernot, Revue d'Histoire Littéraire de la France,  XCV/1 (Janvier-Fevrier 1995), p. 127



 



The ability to construct a nuanced narrative or complex character in the constrained form of the short story has sometimes been seen as the ultimate test of an author's creativity. Yet during the time when the short story was at its most popular - the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries - even the greatest writers followed strict generic conventions that were far from subtle.



This expanded and updated translation of Florence Goyet's influential La Nouvelle, 1870-1925: Description d'un genre à son apogée (Paris, 1993) is the only study to focus exclusively on this classic period across different continents. Ranging through French, English, Italian, Russian and Japanese writing - particularly the stories of Guy de Maupassant, Henry James, Giovanni Verga, Anton Chekhov and Akutagawa Rūnosuke - Goyet shows that these authors were able to create brilliant and successful short stories using the very simple 'tools of brevity' of that period.



In this challenging and far-reaching study, Goyet looks at classic short stories in the context in which they were read at the time: cheap newspapers and higher-end periodicals. She demonstrates that, despite the apparent intention of these stories to question bourgeois ideals, they mostly affirmed the prejudices of their readers. In doing so, her book forces us to rethink our preconceptions about this 'forgotten' genre.



 



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Language
French
ISBN
9781909254756
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
PART I: STRUCTURE
1. Paroxystic Characterisation
Extremes in the fantastic short story
2. Antithetic Structure
Secondary tensions
Editing antithetic tension: Maupassant and James
3. Ending with a Twist
The “twist-in-the-tail” and antithetic tension
The “Twist-in-the-tail” and retroreading
“Open” texts and tension
4. The Tools of Brevity
Preconstructed material
Character types
Recurring characters and empty characters
Tight focus
Permanence of types
Hypotyposis and schematisation
Short stories, sensational news items and serials
The short story: privileged object of narratology
PART II: MEDIA
6. Exoticism in the Classic Short Story
The role of the press
Exotic subjects
The constraints of the newspapers
Exceptions to the rule
7. Short Stories and the Travelogue
Praise of nature, criticism of culture
From vision to judgement: guidelines for description
PART III: READER, CHARACTER AND AUTHOR
8. A Foreign World
An explicit distance
The use of types: subversion or immersion?
“Deceptive representations” of reality
The great man
“We are simply the case”: James and abstract entities
Reading at face value: the double distance
9. Dialogue and Character Discreditation
Direct and indirect speech: Verga’s novel versus short stories
Dialect and distancing
Foreign terms
10. The Narrator, the Reflector and the Reader
Unreliable narrators and reflectors
Reliable narrators and reflectors
The short story with a dilemma
Readers’ emotional response to the classic short story
12. Conclusion to Part III: Are Dostoevsky’s Short Stories Polyphonic?
Epilogue: Beyond the Classic Short Story
Lengthy stories: the long Yvette after the brief Yveline
Fantastic tales: the deconstruction of the self
Authors at a crossroads
Bibliography
Index
read
Naturalism
Parox
Verga
James1
Chek
fan2
Mau
Stev
ohen
Verg1
Tieck
Akutagawa1
James2
Akutagawa2
Chek1
Mau1
James
James3
end
Chek2
Mau2
retro
Chek3
fan3
Mau3
read1
precon
read2
type
type1
read3
Chek5
prov
Mau4
cyc
emo
James5
James4
type2
Mau5
James6
hyp
fait
novel
news
Mau6
news1
Gil
Fanful
Ver2
Ver3
Chek6
sat
int
read4
Joyce
Prou
Mau7
read5
News2
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