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 […]
The Short Story Cycle: A Marginalized Genre for Marginalized Stories. A Genre Critique of Sandra Cisneros’ Woman Hollering Creek
The short story cycle is an overlooked genre, often dismissed by critics as a short story collection. This lack of attention paid to the interconnectedness between the short stories within a work diminishes the work as a whole by not acknowledging the value added by the relation between the short stories. In the background presented […]
Two Worlds in One Book: “Ways of Sunlight” and the Migrant Short Story Cycle
This chapter argues that Sam Selvon’s short story sequence “Ways of Sunlight” (1957) pioneered a specific technique of constructing coherence between different narratives. While its first nine stories are grouped together under the title of “Trinidad,” the remaining ten appear in a section named “London.” Although the London stories ultimately bridge that separation by depicting […]
Wayward Girls
Wayward Girls represents a culmination of my creative and critical work at the University of North Dakota. The dissertation includes a critical introduction, a collection of short stories, and a pedagogical article. In my critical introduction, I explain ways in which I manipulate narrative and time, the decisions I make about levels of discourse, my […]
Roundtable: Affect, the Short Story, and the Cycle
First paragraph: The editors of this special section asked a panel of experts to weigh in on questions related to the short story, the short story cycle, genre and form, emotion, affect, and effects on the reader. The roundtable is divided into two sections, the first of which deals with connections between genre, form, and […]
A Continuum of Fragmentation: Distinguishing the Short Story Cycle from the Composite Novel
First paragraph: The first decades of the twenty-first century have witnessed the publication of several works of fiction that, though marketed as novels, wear that label rather uneasily. These works are highly fragmented texts, made up of separate textual units – short stories, novellas, sketches, textual fragments, or a mixture of these – which become […]
Unresolved Tensions: William Faulkner’s The Unvanquished as a Short-Story Cycle
This essay argues for a wider recognition of The Unvanquished as a short-story cycle and for a new appreciation of its generic features of simultaneous fragmentation and unity. For much of its critical history The Unvanquished was misinterpreted as a short story miscellany or as a bildungsroman. Reading it as a short-story cycle allows an […]