This critical guide to William Faulkner's short fiction also provides a history of Faulkner's development from an apprentice writer of short stories into a novelist who is a master of his craft. The author presents a balanced assessment of Faulkner's strengths and weaknesses as a writer of short stories. While praising Faulkner for his extraordinary range and diversity, vivid imagination, energy, and inventiveness, he proceeds to analyze Faulkner's technical weaknesses, e.g., uneven handling of point of view, treatment of plot, narrative strategies, and difficulty with the short story form. The concluding chapter discusses the complex relation of Faulkner's short fiction to the novels. Story excerpts, Faulkner's comments on the craft of writing, and interesting comparisons with Hemingway, Chekhov, and others are included. An important work on a subject that has received insufficient attention; recommended for American literature collections.
-Lesley Jorbin, Cleveland State Univ. Lib.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

With an Overview by Paul Smith and a Checklist to Hemingway Criticism, 1975–1990

New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway is an all-new sequel to Benson’s highly acclaimed 1975 book, which provided the first comprehensive anthology of criticism of Ernest Hemingway’s masterful short stories. Since that time the availability of Hemingway’s papers, coupled with new critical and theoretical approaches, has enlivened and enlarged the field of American literary studies. This companion volume reflects current scholarship and draws together essays that were either published during the past decade or written for this collection.
The contributors interpret a variety of individual stories from a number of different critical points of view—from a Lacanian reading of Hemingway’s “After the Storm” to a semiotic analysis of “A Very Short Story” to an historical-biographical analysis of “Old Man at the Bridge.” In identifying the short story as one of Hemingway’s principal thematic and technical tools, this volume reaffirms a focus on the short story as Hemingway’s best work. An overview essay covers Hemingway criticism published since the last volume, and the bibliographical checklist to Hemingway short fiction criticism, which covers 1975 to mid-1989, has doubled in size.

Contributors. Debra A. Moddelmog, Ben Stotzfus, Robert Scholes, Hubert Zapf, Susan F. Beegel, Nina Baym, William Braasch Watson, Kenneth Lynn, Gerry Brenner, Steven K. Hoffman, E. R. Hagemann, Robert W. Lewis, Wayne Kvam, George Monteiro, Scott Donaldson, Bernard Oldsey, Warren Bennett, Kenneth G. Johnston, Richard McCann, Robert P. Weeks, Amberys R. Whittle, Pamela Smiley, Jeffrey Meyers, Robert E. Fleming, David R. Johnson, Howard L. Hannum, Larry Edgerton, William Adair, Alice Hall Petry, Lawrence H. Martin Jr., Paul Smith

The first edition of May’s Short Story Theories (1976) opened with an essay entitled “The Short Story: An Underrated Art.” Almost two decades later, the short story suffers no such slight. Publishers and critics have become increasingly interested in the form, which has enjoyed a renaissance led by such writers as Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff, Ann Beattie, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Mary Robison. An important part of this revival of interest, Short Story Theories has continued to attract a strong and loyal audience among students and teachers.

The New Short Story Theories includes a few basic pieces from the earlier volume—Poe’s Hawthorne review, Brander Matthew’s extension and formalization of Poe’s theories, and essays by Randall Jarrell, Elizabeth Bowen, and Nadine Gordimer—but most of the essays are new to the collection.

Addressing problems of definition, historical considerations, issues of technique, and cognitive approaches, essays include:
“The Tale as Genre in Short Story Fiction,” by W. S. Penn
“O. Henry and the Theory of the Short Story,” by Suzanne C. Ferguson
“On Writing,” by Raymond Carver
“From Tale to Short Story,” by Robert F. Marler
“A Cognitive Approach to Storyness,” by Susan Lohafer

May’s new collection will continue to highlight the short story, to provoke debate, and to enrich our experience of a demanding and rewarding literary form.

      The twelve contemporary fiction writers interviewed in Passion and
        Craft go beyond the merely autobiographical, revealing that, despite
        their differences, they share passionate devotion and discipline for their
        craft.
      Included are Richard Ford, winner in 1995 of both the Pulitzer Prize
        and the PEN/Faulkner Award; Gina Berriault, 1997 winner of the National
        Book Critics Circle Award; Bobbie Ann Mason; T. Coraghessan Boyle; Rick
        Bass; Leonard Michaels; Christopher Tilghman; Thom Jones; Julia Alvarez;
        Andre Dubus; Jayne Anne Phillips; and Tobias Wolff.
      Their comments will interest readers devoted to their novels and stories,
        other writers, and aspiring writers.
 

Although the short story has often been called America’s unique contribution to the world’s literature, relatively few critics have taken the form seriously. May’s collection of essays by popular commentators, academic critics, and short story writers attempts to assess the reasons for this neglect and provides significant theoretical directions for a reevaluation of the form.

The essays range from discussions by Poe to comments by John Cheever. Frank O’Connor describes the short story as depicting “an intense awareness of human loneliness,” and Nadine Gordimer suggests that the story is more suitable than the novel in rendering the fragmentary modern experience. Eudora Welty sees the story as something “wrapped in an atmosphere” of its own; Randall Jarrell speaks of the mythic basis of the genre. Elizabeth Bowen and Alberto Moravia discuss thematic and structural distinctions between the novel and the story.

The collection also includes discussions of various types of stories, as satiric and lyric, critical surveys of the development of the modern short story, and the status of the form at the present time. An excellent annotated bibliography is also included, which describes 135 books and articles on the short story, evaluating their contribution to a unified theory of the form.

Raymond Carver, known in some circles as the “godfather of minimalism,” has been credited by many as the rejuvenator of the once-dying American short story. (See the link on this page to a 2008 Kenyon Review story that discusses the recent controversy over the editing of Carver’s stories.) Drawing on representative tales from each of Carver’s major volumes of fiction, Nesset’s critical exploration leads us deep into the heart of Carver country, an eerie post-industrial world of low-rent survivors. In the earliest fiction, the politics of sex are tied to politics of fortune and chance; marriage as an institution is capricious and unsettling. In later stories, the gesture of telling stories provides an escape for certain of these characters, metaphorically and otherwise; and in Carver’s last stories, subtle strategies of language offer a similar, if more tentative release. From beginning to end, Carver’s distinctive, highly imitative style is intrinsic to his subject and is crucial in presenting what Carver called the “dark side of Reagan’s America.”

In this comprehensive study of Carver, Nesset discusses the relationship of minimalism and postmodern trends and the rise of new realism. By locating Carver in the gallery of American letters, Nesset shows him to be at once more simple and more complex than we might have believed, skillfully laying the groundwork for Carver studies to come.