Test 2

1. A short story[1] is a work of fiction that is usually written in prose, often in narrative format. A
short story usually deals with a few characters and often concentrates on the creation of the mood
rather than the plot.[2]
The short story format tends to be more pointed than longer works of fiction, such as novellas (in
the 20th and 21st century sense) and novels. Short story definitions based on length differ
somewhat, even among professional writers, in part because of the fragmentation of the medium
into genres. Since the short story format includes a wide range of genres and styles, the actual
length is determined by the individual author's preference (or the story's actual needs in terms of
creative trajectory or story arc) and the submission guidelines relevant to the story's actual
market. Guidelines vary greatly among publishers.[3]
Many short story writers define their work through a combination of creative, personal
expression, and artistic integrity. They attempt to resist categorization by genre as well as
definition by numbers, finding such approaches limiting and counter-intuitive to artistic form and
reasoning. As a result, definitions of the short story based on length splinter even more when the
writing process is taken into consideration.
A short story is often judged by its ability to provide a complete or satisfying treatment of its
characters and subject.[4]
Contents
[hide]
1 Overview
2 Length
3 History
o 3.1 Predecessors
o 3.2 1790–1850
o 3.3 1850–1900
o 3.4 1900–1945
o 3.5 After 1945
4 See also
5 References
6 Further reading
7 External links
[edit] Overview
Authors such as Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, William Trevor, Hermann Hesse, Vladimir
Nabokov, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Nathaniel Hawthorne, Virginia Woolf, Bolesław Prus, Dino
Buzzati, Rudyard Kipling, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, P.

2. G. Wodehouse, J.D. Salinger, H. P. Lovecraft, D. H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway and Stephen
King were highly accomplished writers of both short stories and novels.
Short stories have their roots in oral story-telling traditions and the prose anecdote, a swiftly
sketched situation that quickly comes to its point. With the rise of the comparatively realistic
novel, the short story evolved as a miniature version, with some of its first perfectly independent
examples in the tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann. Other 19th-century writers well known for their
short stories include Nikolai Gogol, Guy de Maupassant, and Bolesław Prus.
Some authors are known almost entirely for their short stories, either by choice (they wrote
nothing else) or by critical regard (short-story writing is thought of as a challenging art). An
example is Jorge Luis Borges, who won American fame with "The Garden of Forking Paths",
published in the August 1948 Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Another example is O. Henry
(author of "Gift of the Magi"), for whom the O. Henry Award is named. American examples
include Flannery O'Connor, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver.
Short stories have often been adapted for half-hour and hour radio dramas, as on NBC Presents:
Short Story (1951–52). A Popular example of this is The Hitch-Hiker, read by Orson Welles.
Sometimes, short stories are adapted into television specials, such as 12:01 PM, Nightmare at
20,000 feet, The Lottery, and Button, Button. Others have been made into short films, often
rewritten by other people, and even as feature length films, such is the case of Children of the
Corn, The Birds, Brokeback Mountain, Who Goes There?, Duel, A sound of thunder, The Body,
The Lawnmower Man, and Hearts in Atlantis.
The art of storytelling is doubtlessly older than record of civilization. Even the so-called modern
short story, which was the latest of the major literary types to evolve, has an ancient lineage.
Perhaps the oldest and most direct ancestor of the short story is the anecdote and illustrative
story, straight to the point.
The ancient parable and fable, starkly brief narrative used to enforce some moral or spiritual
truth, anticipate the severe brevity and unity of some short stories written today.
Short stories tend to be less complex than novels. Usually a short story focuses on one incident;
has a single plot, a single setting, and a small number of characters; and covers a short period of
time.
In longer forms of fiction, stories tend to contain certain core elements of dramatic structure:
exposition (the introduction of setting, situation and main characters); complication (the event
that introduces the conflict); rising action, crisis (the decisive moment for the protagonist and his
commitment to a course of action); climax (the point of highest interest in terms of the conflict
and the point with the most action); resolution (the point when the conflict is resolved); and
moral.
Because of their length, short stories may or may not follow this pattern. Some do not follow
patterns at all. For example, modern short stories only occasionally have an exposition. More
typical, though, is an abrupt beginning, with the story starting in the middle of the action (in

3. medias res). As with longer stories, plots of short stories also have a climax, crisis, or turning
point. However, the endings of many short stories are abrupt and open and may or may not have
a moral or practical lesson. As with any art forms, the exact characteristics of a short story will
vary by creator.
Oftentimes, stories cannot be truly considered "short stories" if they are around fifty to a hundred
pages. Short stories are commonly classified as around 5 to 20 pages, but, as mentioned, vary on
length depending on authors. Therefore, longer stories that cannot quite be called novels are
considered "novellas", and, like short stories, are commonly placed into the economically wise
choice of "collections", oftentimes containing previously unpublished stories, in fact, after
Shirley Jackson died, someone found a crate of unpublished short stories in her barn and used
them to make a short story collection in her memory. Sometimes, authors who do not have the
time or money to write a novella or novel decide to write short stories instead and work out a
deal with a popular website or magazine; such as Playboy, to publish them for profit. A good
example of this is author Stephen King, who has created several notorious short story collections
and novella collections, many of which have been adapted into critically acclaimed films.
When short stories intend to convey a specific ethical or moral perspective, they fall into a more
specific sub-category called parables (or fables). This specific kind of short story has been used
by spiritual and religious leaders worldwide to inspire, enlighten, and educate their followers.
[edit] Length
See the article novella for related debate about length.
Determining what exactly separates a short story from longer fictional formats is problematic.
A classic definition of a short story is that one should be able to read it in one sitting, a point
most notably made in Edgar Allan Poe's essay "The Philosophy of Composition" (1846).
Interpreting this standard nowadays is problematic, since the expected length of "one sitting"
may now be briefer than it was in Poe's era. Other definitions place the maximum word count of
the short story at anywhere from 1,000 to 9,000 words, for example, Harris King's "A Solitary
Man" is around 4,000 words. In contemporary usage, the term short story most often refers to a
work of fiction no longer than 20,000 words and no shorter than 1,000. Stories of less than 1,000
words are sometimes referred to as "short short stories", [5] or "flash fiction."
As a point of reference for the science fiction genre writer, the Science Fiction and Fantasy
Writers of America define short story length Nebula Awards for science fiction submission
guidelines as having a word count of less than 7,500.[6]
[edit] History
[edit] Predecessors
Short stories date back to oral story-telling traditions which originally produced epics such as
Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. Oral narratives were often told in the form of rhyming or rhythmic

4. verse, often including recurring sections or, in the case of Homer, Homeric epithets. Such
stylistic devices often acted as mnemonics for easier recall, rendition and adaptation of the story.
Short sections of verse might focus on individual narratives that could be told at one sitting. The
overall arc of the tale would emerge only through the telling of multiple such sections.
Fables, succinct tales with an explicit "moral," were said by the Greek historian Herodotus to
have been invented in the 6th century BCE by a Greek slave named Aesop, though other times
and nationalities have also been given for him. These ancient fables are today known as Aesop's
Fables.
The other ancient form of short story, the anecdote, was popular under the Roman Empire.
Anecdotes functioned as a sort of parable, a brief realistic narrative that embodies a point. Many
surviving Roman anecdotes were collected in the 13th or 14th century as the Gesta Romanorum.
Anecdotes remained popular in Europe well into the 18th century, when the fictional anecdotal
letters of Sir Roger de Coverley were published.
In Europe, the oral story-telling tradition began to develop into written stories in the early 14th
century, most notably with Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Giovanni Boccaccio's
Decameron. Both of these books are composed of individual short stories (which range from
farce or humorous anecdotes to well-crafted literary fictions) set within a larger narrative story (a
frame story), although the frame-tale device was not adopted by all writers. At the end of the
16th century, some of the most popular short stories in Europe were the darkly tragic "novella"
of Matteo Bandello (especially in their French translation).
The mid 17th century in France saw the development of a refined short novel, the "nouvelle", by
such authors as Madame de Lafayette. In the 1690s, traditional fairy tales began to be published
(one of the most famous collections was by Charles Perrault). The appearance of Antoine
Galland's first modern translation of the Thousand and One Nights (or Arabian Nights) (from
1704; another translation appeared in 1710–12) would have an enormous influence on the 18th
century European short stories of Voltaire, Diderot and others.
[edit] 1790–1850
There are early examples of short stories published separately between 1790 and 1810, but the
first true collections of short stories appeared between 1810 and 1830 in several countries around
the same period.[7]
The first short stories in the United Kingdom were gothic tales like Richard Cumberland's
"remarkable narrative" "The Poisoner of Montremos" (1791).[8] Great novelists like Sir Walter
Scott and Charles Dickens also wrote some short stories.
One of the earliest short stories in the United States was Charles Brockden Brown's
"Somnambulism" from 1805. Washington Irving wrote mysterious tales including "Rip van
Winkle" (1819) and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" (1820). Nathaniel Hawthorne published the
first part of his Twice-Told Tales in 1837. Edgar Allan Poe wrote his tales of mystery and
imagination between 1842 and 1859. Classic stories are "The Fall of the House of Usher", "The

5. Tell-Tale Heart", "The Cask of Amontillado", "The Pit and the Pendulum", and the first detective
story, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue". In "The Philosophy of Composition" (1846) Poe
argued that a literary work should be short enough for a reader to finish in one sitting. [9]
In Germany, the first collection of short stories was by Heinrich von Kleist in 1810 and '11. The
Brothers Grimm published their first volume of collected fairy tales in 1812. E. T. A. Hoffmann
followed with his own original fantasy tales, of which "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King"
(1816) is the most famous.
In France. Prosper Mérimée wrote Mateo Falcone in 1829.
In Russia. Alexander Pushkin wrote romantic and mysterious tales, including "The Blizzard"
(1831) and "The Queen of Spades" (1834). Nikolai Gogol's "Nevsky Prospekt" (1835), "The
Nose" (1836) and "The Overcoat" (1842) are dark humorous tales about human misery.
[edit] 1850–1900

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