The Modernist Short Story
Dr Jenny McDonnell
jemcdonn@tcd.ie
Duration: One Semester (MT)
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the short story remained a relatively young
form. From its origins in the pages of the nineteenth-century periodical press it
emerged, as Winnie Chan suggests, as ‘the product of both mass culture and the
backlash against it’, and by the end of the century it had gained the attention both of
popular and avant-garde writers. Throughout the early decades of the twentieth
century, it subsequently gained particular currency with a number of key modernist
writers, to the extent that Dominic Head has argued that, ‘far from being ‘smaller and
lesser’ in any technical sense, [the short story] actually exemplified the strategies of
modernist fiction. This one-semester course will examine the suitability of the short
story to the modernist project, by exploring the ways in which modernist writers
employed the form to ‘capture the episodic nature of twentieth-century experience’,
as Head further suggests. It will address a range of themes and topics, including (but
not limited to): theories of the short story; modernist narrative strategies within short
fictional forms; the links between form and publication context; the relationship
between modernist and popular short fiction; class, gendered and national identities.
It will explore short stories by: Katherine Mansfield, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf,
D.H. Lawrence, Jean Rhys, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Raymond
Chandler and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
A full course schedule will be made available in September 2011.
Recommended reading
Hanson, Clare, Short Stories and Short Fictions 1880-1980 (London: Macmillan,
1985)
Hanson, Clare (ed.), Re-reading the Short Story (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989)
Dominic Head, The Modernist Short Story: A Study in Theory and Practice
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992
Hunter, Adrian, The Cambridge Introduction to the Short Story in English
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)
Lohafer, Susan and Jo Ellen Clarey (eds), Short Story Theory at a Crossroads
(Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1989)
March-Russell, Paul, The Short Story: An Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2009)
May, Charles E., The Short Story: The Reality of Artifice (New York: Twayne, 1995)
O’Connor, Frank, The Lonely Voice: a Study of the Short Story (London: Macmillan,
1965)
Scofield, Martin, The Cambridge Introduction to the American Short Story.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)
Shaw, Valerie. The Short Story: A Critical Introduction (London: Longman, 1983)