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 […]
The Uses and the Limits of the Short Story: The Function of Character Migration in Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women
This article explores the phenomenon of character migration in one of Alice Munro’s early works, Lives of Girls and Women from 1971. Munro vitally maintains the typical structure of the modern Anglo-American short story, with its tendency toward condensation and building toward its ending, as well as the form’s thematic principle of the epiphany concept. But she […]
Nomadic Genres: The Case of the Short Story Cycle
Excerpt: The short story cycle, often relegated to the margin of literary studies, offers a pertinent example of a nomadic genre. Because it resists definition, it inhabits a liminal space straddling the short story and the novel. The fixed centrality of the novel, as a recognized and well-established genre, is upset by texts trespassing borders […]
Experimentalism and Innovation in the Kurdish Short Story in Bahdinan Since 1991
Abstract Within the framework of experimentation and innovation in the short story, this study examines the most significant creative aspects of the Kurdish short story written in Kurmanji dialect in Bahdinan in Iraqi Kurdistan. A specific period was covered, starting in 1991, as this represented the genesis of a new era in Kurdish literature. Despite […]
Inheritance: A linked short story collection
Inheritance is a linked short story collection of eight fictional narratives of lives impacted by interpersonal violence and abuse, along with the myriad of complexities we navigate through the course of our daily lives. Fictional stories often portray those who have experienced gendered violence as victims or as permanently harmed. Constructing victimized people as silenced, […]