Companion to the American Short Story

Alfred Bendixen has taught at Princeton University, Texas A&M University, California State University – Los Angeles, and Barnard College. He is best known as the founder and Executive Director of the American Literature Association. His recent work focuses on the development of genre in a democratic society and includes The Cambridge Companion to American Travel Writing, co-edited with Judith Hamera (2009); A Companion to the American Novel, (Blackwell 2012); The Cambridge History of American Poetry, co-edited with Stephen Burt (2015); and The Centrality of Crime Fiction in American Literary Culture, co-edited with Olivia Carr Edenfield ( Routledge 2017).James Nagel is the Eidson Distinguished Professor of American Literature Emeritus at the University of Georgia. From 2012 to 2018 he served as Resident Scholar at Dartmouth College. Early in his career he founded the scholarly journal Studies in American Fiction and the widely influential series Critical Essays on American Literature. Among his twenty-four books are Stephen Crane and Literary Impressionism, Hemingway in Love and War (which was made into a Hollywood film directed by Lord Richard Attenborough), The Contemporary American Short-Story Cycle, and Race and Culture in New Orleans Stories. He has published some eighty articles in the field, and he has lectured on American literature in seventeen countries.

"This accessible and attractive volume is split into four sections offering a history of the American short story. The first three are presented chronologically, with chapters on stories from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and a transitional period in between . . . For all readers, it is what such a Companion should be-a ladder that the newly enthused short-story reader will climb, only to move onto higher ground." (Routledge ABES, 2011)

• Notes on Contributors viiiPreface xivAcknowledgments xviPart I: The Nineteenth Century 11 The Emergence and Development of the American Short Story 3Alfred Bendixen2 Poe and the American Short Story 20Benjamin F. Fisher3 A Guide to Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” 35Steven T. Ryan4 Towards History and Beyond: Hawthorne and the American Short Story 50Alfred Bendixen5 Charles W. Chesnutt and the Fictions of a “New” America 68Charles Duncan6 Mark Twain and the American Comic Short Story 78David E. E. Sloane7 New England Local-Color Literature: A Colonial Formation 91Josephine Donovan8 Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Feminist Tradition of the American Short Story 105Martha J. Cutter9 The Short Stories of Edith Wharton 118Donna CampbellPart II: The Transition into the New Century 13310 The Short Stories of Stephen Crane 135Paul Sorrentino11 Kate Chopin 152Charlotte Rich12 Frank Norris and Jack London 171Jeanne Campbell Reesman13 From “Water Drops” to General Strikes: Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Short Fiction and Social Change 187Andrew J. FurerPart III: The Twentieth Century 21514 The Twentieth Century: A Period of Innovation and Continuity 217James Nagel15 The Hemingway Story 224George Monteiro16 William Faulkner’s Short Stories 244Hugh Ruppersburg17 Katherine Anne Porter 256Ruth M. Alvarez18 Eudora Welty and the Short Story: Theory and Practice 277Ruth D. Weston19 The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Structure, Narrative Technique, Style 295Kirk Curnutt20 “The Look of the World”: Richard Wright on Perspective 316Mikko Tuhkanen21 Small Planets: The Short Fiction of Saul Bellow 328Gloria L. Cronin22 John Updike 345Robert M. Luscher23 Raymond Carver in the Twenty-First Century 366Sandra Lee Kleppe24 Multi-Ethnic Female Identity and Denise Chávez’s The Last of the Menu Girls 380Karen WeekesPart IV: Expansive Considerations 38925 Landscape as Haven in American Women’s Short Stories 391Leah B. Glasser26 The American Ghost Story 408Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock27 The Detective Story 425Catherine Ross Nickerson28 The Asian American Short Story 436Wenying Xu29 The Jewish American Story 450Andrew Furman30 The Multiethnic American Short Story 466Molly Crumpton Winter31 “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” American Restlessness and the Short-Story Cycle 482Jeff BirkensteinIndex 502