Abstract
The modernist short story grew out of the psychological sketch of the 1890s. Like the psychological sketch it is more properly called a type of short fiction for one of its leading characteristics is a rejection of ‘story’ in the accepted sense. Modernist short fiction writers distrusted the well-wrought tale for a variety of reasons. Most importantly they argued that the pleasing shape and coherence of the traditional short story represented a falsification of the discrete and heterogeneous nature of experience. Such stories relied on a too-ready and facile identification of causal relationships. And the achieved and rounded finality of the tale was distrusted, for ‘story’ in this sense seemed to convey the misleading notion of something finished, absolute, and wholly understood.
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Notes
Nadine Gordimer, in ‘The International Symposium on the Short Story’, Kenyon Review, vol. 30 (1968) p. 459.
James Joyce, Stephen Hero (1944) p. 188.
James Joyce, Dubliners, Penguin edn (Harmondsworth, 1963) pp. 35–6.
The Critical Writings of James Joyce, ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann (1959) p. 116.
Virginia Woolf, A Haunted House and Other Stories, Penguin edn (Harmondsworth, 1973) pp. 9–10.
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929) p. 140.
The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 2: 1920–24, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (1978) p. 13.
A Change of Perspective: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3: 1923–28, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (1977) p. 385 (letter to Roger Fry, 27 May 1927).
Quoted in the Introduction to Mrs Dalloway’s Party: A Short Story Sequence by Virginia Woolf, ed. Stella McNichol (1973) p. 15.
Virginia Woolf, ‘The Art of Fiction’, The Moment and Other Essays (1947) p. 92.
How Writing is Written, vol. 2 of the previously uncollected writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Robert Bartlett Haas (Los Angeles, 1974) p. 155.
Gertrude Stein: Writings and Lectures 1911–1945, ed. Patricia Meyerowitz (1967) pp. 124–5.
Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Carl Van Vechten, with an essay by F. W. Dupee (New York, 1972) p. 329.
See Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Buskin (1964) pp. 117–18, for a discussion of linguistic ‘difference’.
Paul Hernadi, Beyond Genre: New Directions in Literary Classification (New York, 1972) p. 182.
From Death in the Afternoon, quoted in Charles A. Fenton, The Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway: The Early Years, Mentor edn (New York, 1961) pp. 182–3.
Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa (1936) p. 33.
Ernest Hemingway, Winner Take Nothing, Triad/Panther edn (1977) p. 62 (all subsequent references are to this edition).
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© 1985 Clare Hanson
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Hanson, C. (1985). Moments of Being: Modernist Short Fiction. In: Short Stories and Short Fictions, 1880–1980. Macmillan Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17685-4_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17685-4_4
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