Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women and The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose are two literary works that hardly fit into one single literary category. Critics of all quarters are at one and of the same mind as to the slippery and elusive nature of Alice’s art. However, despite being approached by […]
The enigma of development: building a reflexive point of view across remote contexts
This thesis singles out point of view (POV) as the governing technical choice in creative writing. As such it integrates creative practice with an essay on the theoretical basis for a POV across remote contexts. The methodology follows Mikhail Bakhtin’s call for a new story telling position through an enquiry into Western literary history, Classical […]
Narrating the Community: The Short Story Cycles of Val Mulkerns and Mary Beckett
From the introduction: The opening essay by Elke D’hoker raises our awareness of an Irish genre tradition that has received surprisingly little attention: the short story cycle. While the short story – characterised by Declan Kiberd as “the natural result of a fusion between the ancient form of the [orally transmitted] folk tale and the preoccupations […]
A Review of Concise Literature: The Short Story Cycle
A reflection on the process of writing a short story cycle
Introduction: On the Stickiness of the Short Story and the Cycle
In lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the text: The title of this introduction—”On the Stickiness of the Short Story and the Cycle”—refers to a number of concerns investigated in the roundtable and articles that make up the special section that follows: how stories in a cycle seem to stick together more cohesively […]
Realism in eco fiction: Climate change and the short story cycle
Fiction has the potential to bring the climate crisis into the imagination and help readers understand and respond to climate change. From speculative ‘cli-fi’ to contemporary eco fiction, literary responses to climate change vary greatly and continue to evolve. Despite the ongoing popularity of speculative climate change fiction, climate change increasingly appears in realist genres, […]
The Shape of Things to Come – An Interview with Lars Bernaerts
The following is an excerpt from an interview with Prof. Lars Bernaerts of Ghent University. He has founded and coordinated the Centre for the Study of Experimental Literature (SEL), which, among other things, will have some focus on the story cycle as such (not necessarily the short story cycle). I have chosen a particular passage […]
Rubik, the Short Story Cycle, and the Digital Age
In the 21st century, the demands of digital presence and the distractions of the internet simultaneously challenge writers wishing to represent contemporary life and threaten the attention readers are willing to give to literature. In this paper I argue that the short story cycle is a literary form that is capable of representing digital life […]
Depictions of Communities in Short Story Cycles
Excerpt from the introduction: In 1988, Sarah A Zagarell published her article, “Narrative of Community: The Identification of a Genre”, to articulate the conventions of stories about communities. In response to the over-reliance of individualism in Western literature, Zagarell draws on historical and contemporary works that focus on the community to develop a genre dedicated […]
Short Story Long: Towards a Poetics of the Novel in Stories
This thesis contains an interesting discussion of how to understand the novel in stories (short story cycle) vis-à-vis the novel. It is free to download and read from the link below but the PDF-file is encrypted and there is no abstract (at least none that I can find). You should therefore download the file itself […]
Mujeres de guerra, las grandes olvidadas: Análisis de la figura femenina en Largo noviembre de Madrid (1980), La tierra será un paraíso (1989) y Capital de la gloria (2003) de Juan Eduardo Zúñiga
Resumé: La mujer ha sido siempre una figura vulnerable sometida a las exigencias de una sociedad patriarcal que limita su libertad y la confina al silencio. Durante la Guerra Civil y la posguerra su realidad fue excluida de la historiografía, considerándosela una mera víctima pasiva. Con su trilogía, J. E. Zúñiga busca recuperar ese pasado […]
The Tales of Frederick Philip Grove
The twenty-three stories in the original version of Frederick Philip Grove’s Tales from the Margin comprise a cycle: characters recur and the locale is limited to Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Alberta: the Canadian Prairies. This paper will examine how our perception of Grove’s cycle alters when the stories are viewed as tales. This is the label […]