Short Story: Historical Periods
A brief characterization of the main periods, with examples:
Romantic. This derives from the high British Romantic period (approx. 1789-1824), which was very influential on writing in Europe and the USA during the rest of the 19th Century. The particular characteristics relevant to our course are
- the lyrical aspect of the poetry, which provides an expressive and compressed vehicle for poets such as Coleridge or Keats to study the workings of their own minds or that of others (e.g. "Frost at Midnight" or "Ode to a Nightingale") or to provide a detailed rendering of the natural scene (e.g., Keats "Ode to Autumn").
- the Gothic impulse, which is evident most obviously in a series of novels (Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, etc.), but also several important poems (e.g., "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"), and which generally deals with an estranged and/or dangerous male protagonist, often a victimized young orphaned woman, and scenes of mountainous, sublime country, ruined abbeys, castles, etc.
Some of these features are picked up the first short story writers (depending on the writer), including Dickens, Gaskell, and in particular Poe. The atmosphere of menace in Poe, his settings (e.g., The House of Usher), of victimized or paranoid protagonists, builds on both the lyrical and Gothic elements. Gothic is even invoked later to describe Faulkner's work as "southern Gothic." While Romanticism as the term for a period is no longer appropriate later in the 19th Century (when for British writing we speak of Victorian: Queen Victoria was on the throne from 1827 to 1901), Romantic traits continued to evolve through the century until:
Modernism. This can be dated to the late 1890s with the work of Henry James and Joseph Conrad (whose "Heart of Darkness" is first published in 1899). It extends to the 1930s. It is chacterized in poetry by the development of the imagist style (Pound) which builds on the French Symbolists, and an anti-romantic stance (T. S. Eliot), but in other ways reinvigorates and develops some Romantic modes, especially the focus on consciousness; thus in fiction the technique of free indirect discourse is a particular marker of the modernist style. Other influences are the work of Freud, which is beginning to be known widely (although not always accepted) by the 1920s and the early anthropology of Frazer's The Golden Bough. There is a growing sense of the irrational and unconscious forces of the mind, and the unreliability of consciousness. The old and tried methods of narrative realism, the well constructed plot, the stable character, etc., are discarded. Modernism is already anticipated by Chopin and Chekhov, but the most representative writers in our course are Joyce, Mansfield, Woolf, and D. H. Lawrence, with an important place for Hemingway.
Postmodernism is really a number of different things, which begin to appear in the 1930s but are most evident in the post-war period. Most centrally, as Clare Hanson puts it, "The characteristic fragmentation of postmodernist discourse is the direct result of a confrontation with language as itself problematic. The primary question is that of the ability of language to express" (141). It is shown that "reality" and "perception" are the constructs of a particular culture and language; hence the emphasis on stereotypes that we saw in several more recent stories, e.g, O'Connor, Munro, Gallant, as though this is all there is. There are no longer any master narratives, as Lyotard put in The Postmodern Condition. At the same time, significant literature is being written outside this tradition by such authors as Laurence, MacLeod, King, which draw more eclectically on a range of stylistic and thematic traditions; this makes it impossible to classify them as postmodernist, and in some ways a postcolonialist framework may be more appropriate (consider the reflections on the "Indians" -- actually Metis -- in "The Loons").
Document prepared April 11 2001