- Home
- A-Z Publications
- Short Fiction in Theory & Practice
- Previous Issues
- Volume 7, Issue 1, 2017
Short Fiction in Theory & Practice - Volume 7, Issue 1, 2017
Volume 7, Issue 1, 2017
-
-
Towards a poetics of editing for the twenty-first century
Authors: Adnan MahmutoviĆ and Lucy DurneenAbstractRobert Gottlieb said that ‘the editor’s relationship to a book should be an invisible one but invisible or not, the implication is nonetheless that it should exist’. This article examines the writer–editor relationship that Gottlieb describes as ‘fraught with difficulty’ (but equally encouraging of what Toni Morrison calls ‘imaginative recklessness’) from the perspective, as Barthes might have it, of both the ‘ones who write’ and also ‘the ones who rewrite’. As editors for the journals Short Fiction and Two Thirds North and published short story writers, ourselves, we reflect on contemporary reading aesthetics as much as creative practice, with specific reference to published stories in draft and final-edit forms in order to work towards piecing together a poetics of editing in relation to short fiction.
-
-
-
Something Rich and Strange (2014): Ron Rash’s short fiction poetics
More LessAbstractRegarding the 2014 publication of Something Rich and Strange, an extensive selection of short stories by American writer Ron Rash, as a turning point in his career, this article endeavours to present Rash’s art as a short-story writer and to highlight a few characteristic aspects of his short stories, his favourite genre. Looking into the genesis of the compilation, this article tries to situate Rash’s practice as a short-story writer within the literary traditions that now include him, at the junction of various influences. Drawing from several reviews, interviews and volunteering new textual interpretations, it comments on how genres keep circulating in Rash’s writing and cautiously tries to verbalize and analyse the recurrent components of Rash’s poetics as a short-story writer who is exceptionally concerned with the interactions of time and place and with the ambivalences of man’s motivations.
-
-
-
Aristotle as a guide to writing detective stories: The Poetics in Melville Davisson Post and Dorothy L. Sayers’s literary theory
By Suzanne BrayAbstractIn his 1994 study on Maupassant and the American Short Story, Richard Fusco mentions a small group of writers and critics, ‘hitherto generally ignored’, who have ‘attempted to apply Aristotelian techniques to the study of the short story’. Among these are two bestselling authors: Melville Davisson Post (1869–1930) and Dorothy L. Sayers (1893–1957), both of whom published detailed studies demonstrating how Aristotle’s Poetics ‘laid down precisely how the short story’, and in particular the mystery story, ‘ought to be built up’. Using Aristotle both to criticize some highbrow literary tendencies of their day as well to inspire their own writing, Post and Sayers agree on the vast majority of the principles they find in the Poetics: in particular on the need for universal appeal, careful, structured plotting, a surprise ending and logical coherence in the plot. However, they disagree on how these principles may best be applied to the dénouement. Their own most successful stories, especially Post’s Uncle Abner Mysteries and Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey and Montague Egg tales, may be seen to follow the Aristotelian theories they present, as do most of the stories included in Sayers’ famous anthologies. Finally, although their theories are little discussed today, it may be observed that many of the most famous short mystery stories in English do in fact follow the principles laid down by Post and Sayers and also that several creative writing courses, in universities and online, teach Aristotle’s Poetics as a guide to successful short story writing.
-
-
-
The abcanny politics of landscape in Lucy Wood’s Diving Belles
More LessAbstractIn a recent article on the eeriness of the English countryside, Robert Macfarlane juxtaposes an official version of English culture, which emphasizes heritage, progress and national unity, with the unofficial versions of ‘Englishness’ being offered by writers, artists, musicians and filmmakers that emphasize local differences, dispossessed peoples or communities, and historical decay or regression. These themes, according to Macfarlane, are mediated through preoccupations with violence, ruins and the uncanny – the revival of interest in Weird fiction writers, such as M. R. James, being exemplary. This article takes up but also expands upon Macfarlane’s argument by focussing on a recent text: Lucy Wood’s 2012 collection, Diving Belles. Of interest here is Wood’s use of the Cornish landscape that she invests not only with literal spirits and ghosts but also with a Weird-like sense of what China Miéville has termed the ‘abcanny’, such that her stories hover somewhere between the traditional ghost story, mundane realism and a peculiarly English variant of magical realism. Although there is little overt political content in Wood’s stories, this article argues that the abcanny form of her stories, whilst also contesting heritage-based representations of Cornwall, mediates the ambiguous relationship of Cornwall towards the English political heartlands. In this sense, then, Macfarlane’s argument can be helpfully developed since, whilst haunted versions of the English countryside can become assimilated into an official model of national heritage, the abcanny landscape remains estranged from such cultural and political appropriation.
-
-
-
The Dark Heart
More LessAbstract‘The Dark Heart’ is an original short story. The author comments: ‘I have long been intrigued by B. S. Johnson’s approach to writing The Unfortunates, a novel in a box with chapters that were designed to be read in any order, apart from the first and last chapters, which were fixed. However, while I would appear to have followed his example with “The Dark Heart”, in which the sections may be read in any order, apart from the opening and closing sections, in fact, in the writing of the story, I was following the same method I used for In Camera (Negative Press London), a collaboration with artist David Gledhill, for which I wrote self-contained sections one page in length that were then printed in an order that was more or less arbitrary.’
-
-
-
Book Reviews
Authors: Dean Baldwin and Charles HoldeferAbstractThe Cambridge Companion to the English Short Story, Ann-Marie Einhaus (ed.) (2016)
Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 250 pp.,
ISBN: 9781107446014, p/bk, £18.99
George Saunders: Critical Essays (American Literature Readings in the 21st Century), Philip Coleman and Steve Gronert Ellerhoff (eds) (2017)
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 292 pp.,
ISBN: 978-3319499314, h/bk (also available in Kindle), £74.50
-