A Companion to the American Short Story Read online




  A Companion to

  the American Short Story

  Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture

  This series offers comprehensive, newly written surveys of key periods and movements and certain major

  authors, in English literary culture and history. Extensive volumes provide new perspectives and positions

  on contexts and on canonical and post - canonical texts, orientating the beginning student in new fi elds of

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  69. A Companion to the American Short Story

  Edited by Alfred Bendixen and James Nagel

  A C O M P A N I O N T O

  T HE A MERICAN

  S HORT S TORY

  E D I T E D B Y

  A L F R E D B E N D I X E N A N D J A M E S N A G E L

  A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication

  This edition fi rst published 2010

  © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd except for editorial material and organization

  © 2010 Alfred Bendixen and James Nagel

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  A companion to the American short story / edited by Alfred Bendixen and James Nagel.

  p. cm. – (Blackwell companions to literature and culture)

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-4051-1543-8 (alk. paper)

  1. Short stories, American–History and criticism. I. Bendixen, Alfred. II. Nagel, James.

  PS374.S5C58

  2010

  813′.0103–dc22

  2009035861

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Set in 11 on 13 pt Garamond 3 by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited

  Printed in Singapore

  1 2010

  Contents

  Notes on Contributors viii

  Acknowledgments xiv

  Part I: The Nineteenth Century

  1

  1 The Emergence and Development of the American Short Story

  3

  Alfred Bendixen

  2 Poe and the American Short Story

  20

  Benjamin F. Fisher

  3 A Guide to Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener”

  35

  Steven T. Ryan

  4 Towards History and Beyond: Hawthorne and the American

  Short Story

  50

  Alfred Bendixen

  5 Charles W. Chesnutt and the Fictions of a “New” America

  68

  Charles Duncan

  6 Mark Twain and the American Comic Short Story

  78

  David E. E. Sloane

  7 New England Local-Color Literature: A Colonial Formation

  91

  Josephine Donovan

  8 Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Feminist Tradition of

  the American Short Story

  105

  Martha J. Cutter

  9 The Short Stories of Edith Wharton

  118

  Donna Campbell

  vi

  Contents

  Part II: The Transition into the New Century 133

  10 The Short Stories of Stephen Crane

  135

&
nbsp; Paul Sorrentino

  11 Kate

  Chopin

  152

  Charlotte Rich

  12 Frank Norris and Jack London

  171

  Jeanne Campbell Reesman

  13 From “Water Drops” to General Strikes: Nineteenth- and

  Early Twentieth-Century Short Fiction and Social Change

  187

  Andrew J. Furer

  Part III: The Twentieth Century 215

  14 The Twentieth Century: A Period of Innovation and Continuity

  217

  James Nagel

  15 The

  Hemingway

  Story

  224

  George Monteiro

  16 William Faulkner’s Short Stories

  244

  Hugh Ruppersburg

  17 Katherine

  Anne

  Porter

  256

  Ruth M. Alvarez

  18 Eudora Welty and the Short Story: Theory and Practice

  277

  Ruth D. Weston

  19 The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Structure, Narrative

  Technique, Style

  295

  Kirk Curnutt

  20 “The Look of the World”: Richard Wright on Perspective

  316

  Mikko Tuhkanen

  21 Small Planets: The Short Fiction of Saul Bellow

  328

  Gloria L. Cronin

  22 John

  Updike

  345

  Robert M. Luscher

  23 Raymond Carver in the Twenty-First Century

  366

  Sandra Lee Kleppe

  24 Multi-Ethnic Female Identity and Denise Chávez’s The Last of

  the Menu Girls 380

  Karen Weekes

  Contents

  vii

  Part IV: Expansive Considerations 389

  25 Landscape as Haven in American Women’s Short Stories

  391

  Leah B. Glasser

  26 The American Ghost Story

  408

  Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock

  27 The

  Detective

  Story

  425

  Catherine Ross Nickerson

  28 The Asian American Short Story

  436

  Wenying Xu

  29 The Jewish American Story

  450

  Andrew Furman

  30 The Multiethnic American Short Story

  466

  Molly Crumpton Winter

  31 “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” American Restlessness and

  the Short-Story Cycle

  482

  Jeff Birkenstein

  Index 502

  Notes on Contributors

  Ruth M. Alvarez is the Curator of Literary Manuscripts at the University of Maryland

  Libraries. She has responsibility for the Papers of Katherine Anne Porter as well as

  nearly twenty related collections of primary materials that support the study of

  Katherine Anne Porter. With Thomas F. Walsh, she edited Uncollected Early Prose of

  Katherine Anne Porter and, with Kathryn Hilt, Katherine Anne Porter: An Annotated

  Bibliography . For Mexico ’ s Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, she edited

  Un pa í s familiar: Escritos sobre M é xico [ “ My Familiar Country ” : Katherine Anne Porter ’ s

  Writings on Mexico].

  Alfred Bendixen is Professor of English at Texas A & M University. He is the founder

  of the American Literature Association, which he currently serves as Executive Direc-

  tor. His books include Haunted Women (1985), an edition of the composite novel The

  Whole Family (1986), “ The Amber Gods ” and Other Stories by Harriet Prescott Spofford,

  (1989), and Edith Wharton: New Critical Essays (1992). He is the associate editor of

  the Continuum Encyclopedia of American Literature (1999), the co - editor of the recently

  published Cambridge Companion to American Travel Writing (2009), and the editor of

  the forthcoming Blackwell Companion to the American Novel .

  Jeff Birkenstein has strong interests in the short story and the story sequence as well

  as in food and cultural criticism. His co - edited collection of essays entitled Reframing

  9/11: Film, Popular Culture and the “ War on Terror ” (with Anna Froula of East Carolina

  University and Karen Randell of Southampton Solent University) is due out in the

  Spring of 2010. He is working currently on Cultural Representation in the International

  Short Story Sequence , co - edited with Robert M. Luscher. He is an Associate Professor

  of English at Saint Martin ’ s University.

  Donna Campbell is Associate Professor of English at Washington State University.

  She is the author of Resisting Regionalism: Gender and Naturalism in American Fiction,

  1885 – 1915 (1997), and her work has appeared in Legacy , Studies in American Fiction ,

  American Literary Realism , and Studies in American Naturalism , among other journals.

  Notes on Contributors

  ix

  Recent publications include essays on Kate Chopin ’ s At Fault in The Cambridge Com-

  panion to Kate Chopin and on Naturalism in the forthcoming Cambridge History of the

  American Novel. Her work on Edith Wharton includes a critical introduction to Edith

  Wharton ’ s The Fruit of the Tree (2000) and essays in the Edith Wharton Review , Jack

  London: One Hundred Years a Writer , and Twisted from the Ordinary: Essays on American

  Literary Naturalism . Her current project is a book on American women writers of

  Naturalism.

  Gloria L. Cronin is College of Humanities Professor and Professor of English at

  Brigham Young University. She is the editor of the The Saul Bellow Journal , an executive

  coordinator of the American Literature Association, recipient of the Pozner Bibliogra-

  phy Prize awarded by the Jewish Library Association, director of the Jewish American

  and Holocaust Literature Annual Symposium, and board member of the African Ameri-

  can Literature and Culture Association. She has published extensively in Saul Bellow

  studies and in the fi elds of Jewish American and African American literatures. She

  recently edited, with Alan L. Berger, the Jewish American Literature Encyclopedia .

  Kirk Curnutt is Professor and Chair of English at Troy University Montgomery. He

  is the author of two novels, Breathing Out the Ghost and Dixie Noir , as well as several

  other books, including The Cambridge Introduction to F. Scott Fitzgerald and Coffee with

  Hemingway .

  Martha J. Cutter is an Associate Professor of English and African American Studies

  at the University of Connecticut and the editor of MELUS: Multi - Ethnic Literature of

  the United States . Her fi rst book, Unruly Tongue: Identity and Voice in American Women ’ s

  Writing 1850 – 1930 , won the 2001 Nancy Dasher Award from the College English

  Association. Her second book,

  Lost and Found in Translation: Contemporary Ethnic

  American Writing and the Politics of Language Diversity , was published in 2005. Her

  articles have appeared in

  American Literature , African American Literature , Callaloo ,

  Women ’ s Studies , Arizona Quarterly , MELUS , Legacy , Criticism , and in the collections Mixed Race Literature and Passing and the Fictions of Identity .

  Josephine Donovan has written or edited eleven books in literary criticism, feminist

  theory, and animal ethics, including New England Local Color Literature ; Sarah Orne

  Jewett ; After the Fall: The Demeter - Persephone Myth in Wharton, Cather, and Glasgow ;<
br />
  Feminist Theory: The Intellectual Traditions ; “ Uncle Tom ’ s Cabin ” : Evil, Affl iction and

  Redemptive Love ; and Gnosticism in Modern Literature . Most recently, she co - edited (with

  Carol J. Adams) The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics . She is Professor Emerita

  of English at the University of Maine.

  Charles Duncan

  is Professor of English, Head of the English Department, and

  Moderator of the Faculty at Peace College, where he teaches American and African

  American Literature. He has published two books, The Absent Man: The Narrative Craft

  of Charles W. Chesnutt and The Northern Stories of Charles W. Chesnutt , as well as several

  articles on Chesnutt, the fi rst African American fi ction writer to earn a national

  x

  Notes on Contributors

  reputation. In addition, he has written essays on fi gures including James Baldwin,

  Frank Norris, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Kate Chopin, Herman Melville, Nathaniel

  Hawthorne, and Timothy Flint.

  Benjamin F. Fisher , Professor of English, University of Mississippi, has many pub-

  lications focusing upon or related to Poe and his writings. He is a past president of

  the Poe Studies Association. Fisher is a member of editorial boards for the Edgar Allan

  Poe Review, Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism , Gothic Studies, Victorian Poetry, and several

  other journals. He has recently published The Cambridge Introduction to Edgar Allan

  Poe (2008), has forthcoming from University of Iowa Press, Edgar Allan Poe in His

  Own Times , and another book about Poe (The Contemporary Reviews) with Cambridge

  University Press. In 1988 Fisher was awarded a Governor ’ s Citation, State of Mary-

  land, for his outstanding contributions to Poe studies.

  Andrew J. Furer has taught at the University of Connecticut, Harvard University,

  Emerson College, and Fordham University. He is the author of essays on such writers

  as Jack London, Stephen Crane, and James Weldon Johnson, including the fi rst major

  article - length overview of London ’ s racial views, as well as a similar essay on London ’ s

  ideal of “ the new womanhood. ” Furer is the editor of a forthcoming volume, The

  Genders of Naturalism , and is currently working on a book - length study of London ’ s

  radicalism. His other research interests include Zitkala - Sa, Paul Robeson, Richard

  Wright, Bernarr Macfadden, and Jazz and Literature.

  Andrew Furman is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of

  English at Florida Atlantic University. His essays and articles on American literature