The Cambridge Companion to the American Short Story

Michael J. Collins is Senior Lecturer in 20th Century American Literature and Culture at King's College London where he teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, life writing, and music. He is the author of The Drama of the American Short Story, 1800–1865 (Michigan, 2016) and Exoteric Modernisms: Progressive Era Literature and the Aesthetics of Everyday Life (Edinburgh, forthcoming). Gavin Jones is the Frederick P. Rehmus Family Professor of the Humanities at Stanford University, where he has taught American literature since 1999. He is the author of four monographs, most recently Failure and the American Writer: A Literary History (Cambridge, 2014), and Reclaiming John Steinbeck: Writing for the Future of Humanity (Cambridge, 2021).

'… reminds the reader why a century of short story writing has shaped American literature from Edgar Allen Poe to Teju Cole. … Highly recommended.' K. Gale, Choice

• Part I. Contexts: 1. Transatlantic print culture and the emergence of short narratives Oliver Scheiding; 2. The short story and the early magazine Jared Gardner; 3. The short story fad: gender, pleasure, and commodity culture in late-nineteenth century magazines Brad Evans; 4. The best of the best: anthologies, prizes, and the short story canon Alexander Manshel; 5. The story of a semester: short fiction and the program era Loren Glass; 6. The short story in the age of the internet Simone Murray; Part II. Histories: 7. The war story Cody Marrs; 8. Narratives from below: working class short fiction Owen Clayton; 9. The short story and the popular imagination: pulp and crime Will Norman; 10. Love what you do: neoliberalism, emotional labor, and the short story as a service Lee Konstantinou; 11. Local color to multiculturalism: minority writers in the short story and ethnographic markets Long Le-Khac; Part III. People and Places: 12. Native American short stories Hertha D. Sweet Wong; 13. African American short fiction: from reform to renaissance Amina Gautier; 14. Little postage stamps: the short story, the American south, and the world Coleman Hutchison; 15. Regional stories and the environmental imagination Sylvan Goldberg; 16. Concrete illuminations: the short story and/as urban revolution Myka Tucker-Abramson; Part IV. Theories: 17. Short fiction, language learning, and innocent comedy Gabriella Safran; 18. The technology of the short story: from sci fi to cli fi Shelley Streeby; 19. Homelessness: the short story and other media Gavin Jones; 20. The human and the animal: toward posthumanist short fiction Michael Lundblad; 21. The end of the story: grammar, gender, and time in the contemporary short story Lola Boorman; 22. The affordances of mere length: computational approaches to short story analysis Mark Algee-Hewitt, Anna Mukamal and J. D. Porter.