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, […]

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 […]

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 […]