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Short Shorts: Exploring Relevance and Filling in Narratives

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Teaching the Short Story

Part of the book series: Teaching the New English ((TENEEN))

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Abstract

Miniature fictions under the title of ‘short shorts’ began to be anthologised in English in the 1980s, growing in popularity and prominence over the past few decades. Very short short stories existed long before then, however, with noteworthy examples found in Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time, Jorge Luis Borges’s The Book of Imaginary Beings and Franz Kafka’s Parables and Paradoxes. A novelty in the repertoire of short stories, these briefer fictions were not studied as belonging to a genre in their own right, but rather they were studied as representations of the writing of a particular author, stories that could be linked thematically to other more prominent longer prose works, such as novels and autobiographical writings.

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© 2011 Paola Trimarco

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Trimarco, P. (2011). Short Shorts: Exploring Relevance and Filling in Narratives. In: Cox, A. (eds) Teaching the Short Story. Teaching the New English. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230316591_2

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