A Brief History of Short Fiction
Always:
Oral cultures, Oral traditions
One example: Native American Creation Myths and Trickster Tales
The Ancient World:
Greece
Rome
Asia
Egyptian papyri dating from 4000 B.C. reveal how the sons of Cheops regaled their father with narrative
The Christian Bible:
In the Old Testament, we have stories such as those of Jonah and of Ruth
In the New Testament, Christ spoke in parables
Other:
A hair-raising werewolf story is embedded in Petronius's Satyricon
Tales were written for both pleasure and moral instruction
The Middle Ages:
Fables (Aesop?) and epics about beasts
Medieval romance and heroic episodes -- e.g., the tales of King Arthur
Low-life comic tales (fabliaux)
Verse narratives
In England, about 1250, some 200 well-known tales were collected in the Gesta Romanorum
In the mid-14th century, Boccaccio assembled the 100 tales in The Decameron (prose)
Shortly thereafter, Chaucer, wrote his framework collection, The Canterbury Tales (verse)
The Renaissance:
In England, France, and Spain, writers followed the Boccaccian tradition
The 16th and 17th Centuries:
The "Picaresque" Novel -- e.g., Cervantes Don Quixote
The 18th Century (Neoclassicism):
The Novel begins to flourish
The Informal Essay and Sketches
In periodicals we see character sketches, satires, gothic tales, rogue stories, simple adventure stories, sentimental stories, etc.
In England, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele were publishing pieces, such as the "Sir Roger de Coverley papers" or "The Vision of Mirzah" in The Tatler and The Spectator
In America, Benjamin Franklin was publishing the "Silence Dogood" papers and, later, Poor Richard's Almanacs
In France, Denis Diderot
Others: Voltaire and the Marquis de Sade
Values: Tradition and Reason
The Early and Middle 19th Century (Romanticism):
The Germans were first: Goethe, Tieck (influenced by Laurence Sterne), E. T. A. Hoffman, Kleist, and the brothers Grimm
In England, Sir Walter Scott (influenced by German writers)
In America, Irving (also influenced by German writers and by folktales), Hawthorne, Poe -- these were the first American writers to create a considerable number of successful short stories
Others: Merimee and Balzac, Gautier and Musset
Values: Originality and Imagination
There was a fascination with psychology and with unusual or eccentric behavior -- e.g., horror stories and criminal stories
With these writers the short story as a distinct genre came into being. Some of these writers consciously formulated the short story as an art form. This development flowered with such speed and force in America that the modern short story is often called an American art form, with only minor exaggeration.
Originally called "Tales" -- they were closer to prose romance than to the novel -- Poe, Gogol, and Hawthorne were the "greatest and most influential writers of short fiction during the romantic era"
"Tales" soon became "Stories" -- for example, Melville's "Bartleby" is more realistic -- the narrator is not a psychological abstraction as is Goodman Brown (Hawthorne) and Montressor (Poe)
The short story begins to have a definition, due in large part to Poe, something like this: " an original prose work in which every word chosen in the structure of the plot, and every detail of description and characterization, contributed to a unified impression"
The Later 19th Century and Early 20th Century (Realism and Naturalism):
After the mid-19th century, Romanticism slowly gave way to Realism
Characters in a novel (and in short stories) wear recognizable social masks and reflect an everyday reality
Anton Chekhov and Leo Tolstoy -- Russian realistic writers
Kate Chopin and Sarah Orne Jewett -- American Local-Color writers (a form of writing which combines romanticism and realism)
Ambrose Bierce (influenced
by Poe) combines romanticism, realism, and modernism
Around the end of the 19th century, O. Henry formulates the tight "surprise-ending story"
Also at the end of the 19th century came the American Realists -- e.g., Willa Cather, Stephen Crane, and Henry James
There were also the Europeans -- Guy de Maupassant (French) and Anton Chekhov (Russian) were the most influential writers of short fiction, especially realistic fiction, due to content
In the early 20th century came the early "modern" writers, heavily influenced by Chekhov -- e.g., Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield
The Early to Mid 20th Century (Modernism):
Writing became more "experimental" and writers were soon called "modernist" writers
Many modernist writers were also heavily influenced by Chekhov and Maupassant (and Joyce) -- e.g., Sherwood Anderson, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Katherine Anne Porter, and Richard Wright
The Mid to Later 20th Century and the 21st Century (Post-Modernism and Contemporary):
Definitions are continually being debated!
Sources:
1.) A Handbook to Literature, 9th edition (2003)
2.) The Story and Its Writer, Compact 4th edition (1995)