Call for Contributors: Handbook of the Short Story

We are editing a Handbook of the Short Story in the World for Brill as part of the series Handbooks of Literary and Cultural Studies, and we are looking for chapters on some specific topics (see below).  We are well aware that the chapters are broad in their scope. Some of these chapters should have a comparativist approach that covers several countries. For that reason, we are looking for potential contributors who have expertise in the field to write a synthetical approach to the topic while at the same time being analytical in the discussion of concrete short stories. Ideally a chapter should offer an overview of the topic, and then discuss three or four authors and/ or stories.

The volume is aimed at non-specialist scholars and graduate (or otherwise advanced) students in literature and cultural studies and it offers balanced accounts, not axe-grinding or reckoning of grievances with other scholars. The chapters aim to provide full balanced accounts at an advanced undergraduate and graduate level, as well as a synthesis of debate, past and current methodologies, and the state of scholarship.  As editors, we are seeking purpose-written contributions, book chapters, between 6,000 and 8,000 words, aiming to explain what sources there are, what methodologies and approaches are appropriate in dealing with them, what issues arise and how they have been treated, indicating also the room for disagreement. In conclusion the chapter must be a guide to the graduate student approaching the material for the first time (focused not marginal, orienting, providing contextual information, pointing out leading or provocative questions).

Contributors should send an abstract (300 – 500 words) and a brief CV to both editors by March 15th 2022. Confirmation of acceptance by April 15th 2022. Final versions should be submitted in December 2022.

If you have any query, please do not hesitate to email us.

Santiago Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan (University of Valladolid) guerrero@fyl.uva.es and  José Ramón Ibáñez Ibáñez (University of Almería) jibanez@ual.es

List of units to cover:

Theoretical approaches

The short story: from the Press to the Digital Age

The Folk Tale

The Fantastic/ Horror/ Gothic Short Fiction

The Science Fiction Short Story

History of Short Fiction

The Rise of the Modern Short Story: Poe, Hawthorne, ETA Hoffmann, J.P. Kleist, N. Gogol, Sir Walter Scott

The Realist Short Story: S. Crane, Henry James, G. Flaubert, G. Maupassant, I. Turgenev, T. Hardy, M. Twain, A. Chekhov

Fin-de-siècle Short Story: Gérard de Nerval, R. Kipling, R. L. Stevenson

The Modernist Short Story: James Joyce, V. Woolf, E. Hemingway, W. Faulkner, F.S. Fitzgerald, K. Mansfield, J. Conrad, Ford Maddox Ford

The Diasporic Short Story: Jhumpa Lahiri, Ha Jin, Sefi Atta, Ben Okri

Regions of the Short Story

The Hispanic and Francophone Caribbean Short Story: A. Carpentier, G. García Márquez, S. Ramírez, Marvel Moreno

The Río de la Plata Short Story: J. L. Borges and J. Cortázar

The North American Short Story in Spanish: J.J. Arreola and A. Monterroso

The Spanish Short Story: G.A. Bécquer, E. Pardo Bazán, I. Aldecoa, C. Fernández Cubas

Ethnic Fiction: M. Hong Kingston, H. M. Viramontes, Louise Erdrich

The Anglo-Indian Short Story: M. Raj Anard, R.K. Narajan and Raja Rao.

The Southeast Asian Short Story

The Arabic Short Story

The Short Story in German: F. Kafka, T. Mann, T. Bernhard

Eastern Europe Short Fiction: Sholom Aleichem, Shalom Asch, I. Bashevis Singer, I. Babel

The East Asian Short Story

The Israeli Short Story

LIST OF CHAPTERS:

Theoretical approaches: The short story: from the Press to the Digital Age

The Folk Tale

The Fantastic/ Horror/ Gothic Short Fiction

The Science Fiction Short Story

History of Short Fiction:

The Rise of the Modern Short Story.

The Realist Short Story.

Fin-de-siècle Short Story.

The Modernist Short Story.

The Diasporic Short Story.

Ethnic Short Fiction.

Regions of the Short Story:

The Hispanic and Francophone Caribbean Short Story.

The Río de la Plata Short Story.

The North American Short Story in Spanish.

The Spanish Short Story.

The Anglo-Indian Short Story.

The Arabic Short Story.

The Israeli Short Story.

The Short Story in German.

Eastern European Short Fiction.

The Southeast Asian Short Story.

The East Asian Short Story.

Edge Hill Prize shortlist 2021

The annual Edge Hill Prize awards £10,000 to the author of what the judges consider to be the best published short-story collection from the UK or Ireland. This year’s shortlist includes previous winner Kevin Barry, plus four debut authors. It also includes two short story cycles.  Full list below:

  • Paradise Block by Alice Ash (Serpent’s Tail/Profile);
  • That Old Country Music by Kevin Barry (Canongate).
  • Lifestyle Choice 10mg by Rosemary Jenkinson (Doire Press);
  • The Earth, Thy Great Exchequer, Ready Lies by Jo Lloyd (Swift Press);
  • Made by Sea and Wood, in Darkness by Alexandros Plasatis (Spuyten Duyvil);
  • She-Clown by Hannah Vincent (Myriad Editions). 

Small and independent publishers have made a strong showing. There’s a huge amount of variety amongst these collections, ranging from tales of migrant fishermen (Plasatis) to postmodern historical fiction (Lloyd) and a magic realist version of life on a council estate (Ash).  The winner will be announced early in 2022 – hopefully at a live event in the UK.

CFP: American short story writers and the American short story as cultural institution

The following call for papers has been selected by the organisers of the 53rd annual Congress of the French Association for American Studies, which will take place at the University of Bordeaux (Michel Montaigne) from 31st May to the 3rd June, 2022. The theme of the congress is “Legitimacy, Authority, Canons”.

American short story writers and the American short story as cultural institution

Maurice Cronin, (University Paris Dauphine)

The short story holds a paradoxical institutional and cultural status in the United States, where it has, by turns, been exalted as the ‘national art form’ and relegated to the role of poor relation to the novel. Since the 1890s, when Brander Matthews designated the “short-story” as a genre in its own right, quite distinct from, and implicitly superior to, the novel, seen as the canonical form of European fiction—a designation that Andrew Levy has described as “an informal declaration of independence from … cultural subservience to European literature” (Levy, 34)—the short story has frequently been accorded an exceptional place in U.S. culture. This is partly attributable to institutional factors specific to the country. The establishment of a modern Anglo-American literary canon to rival the classical canon was a key element in the endeavor to legitimize modern English departments emerging in the early twentieth century in the US. Establishing an American literary tradition was an important part of that endeavor throughout the first half of the century, and the designation of the short story as candidate for the role of “national art form” a notable feature of it (Levy 84).

The genre’s candidacy was subsequently bolstered by the appearance of the New Critical anthology-text books, such as Brooks and Warren’s influential Understanding Fiction (1943, 1959), which gave the short story an important role in high-school and college literature pedagogy, and the emergence of the first creative writing graduate programs, in which the short story was almost immediately adopted as the apprentice genre for aspiring writers of fiction. In the U.S. today, the short story is associated with prestige publications like the New Yorker, and is more than ever at the heart of creative writing pedagogy in graduate workshop programmes. And yet, despite this strong institutional presence—or perhaps even because of it—the short story still gives the impression of a genre caught up in a perpetual quest for legitimacy. This is precisely what makes it a rich subject for exploring the related questions of legitimacy, authority and canons in American studies. The genre’s paradoxical status is attributable partly to the nature of the institutions that have been instrumental to its development in the U.S., and partly to the specific nature of the question of legitimacy in the literary domain more generally. As Patrick Charaudeau shows, legitimacy can generally be defined as a form of social recognition that is always, in some way or another, institutional in nature and origin (Charaudeau, 3). In a sense, literature is itself an institution in the usual sense of the term, but it is also a strange, paradoxically “institutionless institution”, as Jacques Derrida puts it, insofar as “in principle” it “allows one say everything, in every way” (Derrida, 42, 36). As such, what is thereby ‘instituted’ is literary authors’ freedom “to break free of rules, displace them” (37). As a field, then, literature is a relatively weakly institutionalized one. Literary texts do not emerge in a situation in which the rules or norms governing their emission and reception are entirely pre-defined once and for all. As such, they must reflexively negotiate their own emergence, and as it were, legitimize themselves. It follows from this that in the literary domain there is always a potential tension between legitimacy, understood as a form of institutional recognition or sanction, and authority, which in this case must always have a more or less pronounced “charismatic” dimension, insofar as its source is not socially or institutionally visible. This tension between legitimacy and authority is especially relevant to the position of short story writers in the United States precisely because the short story is a genre in which the mediating role of the institutional structures crucial to its development is particularly visible, whether it be in the form of magazine or anthology editors, anthology text books or creative writing workshops. As such institutional factors do not merely surround works, but affect them in their very structure and “content”, this workshop seeks to explore the question of how writers in the U.S. negotiate and renegotiate them within their works. All approaches that help us understand how, since the post-war era, short story writers have managed to construct distinctive literary identities and gain canonical status in a so-called minor genre that has been so heavily institutionalized are welcome.

This question of authors’ negotiation and renegotiation of the cultural and institutional status of the genre is, of course, not just a textual matter. Mode of publication is a particularly crucial institutional factor that all short story writers have to contend with. As Bruno Montfort has argued, what truly distinguishes the short story from the novel is that the former is almost always published alongside other texts. Unlike the novel, its “verbal unit” (the text) very rarely overlaps with its “material unit of publication”, i.e. the book (Montfort 158, my translation). In a culture in which the single-author book still very much remains the prestige publication format for fiction, short stories and short story writers always potentially suffer from a deficit of legitimacy and cultural authority. Given that prior publication in magazines and journals is more than ever a pre-requisite for short-story writers to gain subsequent access to publication in more prestigious formats, contributions that deal with short story writers’ relations with magazine editors—through, for example, examination of author-editor correspondence—are of obvious relevance to this workshop.

The publication of single-author collections would appear to represent a form of consecration for short story writers. Yet whether re-publication of magazine-published stories in single-author collections offers a solution to the deficit of legitimacy and authority that short-story writers have to contend with is moot. Bruno Montfort points out, for instance, that the authority of such collections is more often than not quite restricted, an argument supported by the fact that, to a far greater extent than novels, they are subject to being “dismembered” (Montfort, 165, my translation) and subsequently republished in different formats. The chequered publication history of short story collections in the United States, even those of canonical writers like Hemingway and Faulkner, lends credence to this view. Yet the short story collection as a genre continues to enjoy a degree of presence and cultural prestige in the US today that is unrivalled in most other national literatures. Furthermore, one might wonder whether re-publication of magazine-published stories in single-author collections constitutes a re-assertion of writers’ authority over their texts. Proposals that involve comparative analyses of magazine and book-collection versions of authors’ stories would offer an interesting way of exploring this question.

Re-publication of their stories in short story anthologies may also represent a form of consecration for short story writers. National anthologies are frequently designed to ‘reflect’ a national tradition, or the cultural and social concerns proper to a nation, but in reality they are also instrumental in shaping the traditions they purport to reflect. Editorial selections, and the introductions or prefaces that usually present and justify them to readers, help shape or change readers’ conception of the genre and play an important role in the on-going process of canon formation. The short story anthology genre is no exception, but it has not as yet received the critical attention it undoubtedly deserves (D’hoker, 115). As the tradition of inviting short story writers to edit short story anthologies is very much alive today in the US, contributions that study the prefaces and editorial choices of such anthologies would add to our understanding of the role writers themselves have played in (re)shaping the canon and the short story as a genre.

The roles writers have played as anthology editors show, if it were necessary, that the relationship between writers and the institutions of the literary field is often a symbiotic one. U.S. writers’ widespread involvement as instructors or former students in university creative writing workshops provides further evidence of this. Mark McGurl claims to show that the presence of the workshop system is “everywhere visible … like a watermark” in post-war US prose fiction, manifesting itself most characteristically in the new forms of institutional self-reflexivity that he detects in the texts of novelists and short-story writers of the so-called “program era” (McGurl, 4). However, McGurl’s work is not focused specifically on the short story, and his account of the institutional effects of the workshop system on the genre and on the practice of short story writers is necessarily patchy. Contributions that either build on McGurl’s approach, or pay greater attention than he does to the shaping effects that writers themselves have had on the workshop system through their involvement in it would thus also be very welcome.

500-word (max) proposals for 25-minute conference papers related to the above topics, and a short biographical statement, are to be sent to Maurice Cronin (mcecronin@yahoo.fr) no later than 17th January, 2022.

 

Works cited

Brooks, Cleanth, and Robert Penn Warren. Understanding Fiction, 2nd edition, Prentice-Hall, 1959.

Charaudeau, Patrick. “Le charisme comme condition du leadership politique.” Revue Française des Sciences de l’information et de la communication [en ligne] 7, 2015. Web. 17 November 2021.

Derrida, Jacques. “This Strange Institution Called Literature: An Interview with Jacques Derrida.” Acts of Literature. Ed. Derek Attridge. New York: Routledge, 1991. 33-75.

D’hoker, Elke. “The Short Story Anthology.” Ed. Paul Delaney and Adrian Hunter, The Edinburgh Companion to the Short Story in English. Edinburgh UP, 2019. 108-124.

Levy, Andrew. The Culture and Commerce of the American Short Story. Cambridge UP, 1993.

Matthews, Brander. “The Philosophy of the Short-Story.” Short Story Theories. Ed. Charles E. May. Ohio UP, 1976. 52-59

McGurl, Mark. The Program Era and the Rise of Creative Writing. Harvard UP, 2009.

Montfort, Bruno. “La nouvelle et son mode de publication, le cas américain.” Poétique 90, 1992. 153- 171.

The Other Side of Hope call for submissions

 

The Other Side of Hope is a new journal celebrating refugee and immigrant communities worldwide. Submission of fiction and poetry is open to refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants only. Non-fiction, reviews and interviews welcome from all, so long as the subject matter sheds light on refugee and immigrant life.

Deadline 31st July 2021.

More information available here 

 

Short Fiction in Theory and Practice 10.2: Short Fiction as Humble Fiction

Short Fiction in Theory and Practice  10.2 special issue on Short Fiction as Humble Fiction, guest-edited by Christine Reynier, following the ENSFR conference at Montpellier in October 2019  is now available from Intellect Press.  It also includes an interview with Sarah Hall, book reviews by Corinne Bigot and an interview with film-maker Eric Steel on his adaption of  David Bezmozgis’ ‘Minyan’ .

ARTICLES

 Editorial :’The power of short fiction as a humble genre’

CHRISTINE REYNIER

 ‘Humbling the human: Posthuman explorations in contemporary short fiction’

ELKE D’HOKER

‘The singular effect of brevity: Why Katherine Mansfield’s “The Fly” could not have been a novel’

LISA FEKLISTOVA

‘Regionalist short fiction as humble fiction’

ALDA CORREIA

‘Tourism, tourists, humility and the humble in E. M. Forster’s “The Story of the Siren” (1920)’

EMMANUEL VERNADAKIS

‘Humility and the humble: A reading of the Nepali short stories of Maheshbikram Shah’

KRITIKA CHETTRI

‘”The extremely private literary giant”: Alice Munro’s poetics of humility’

AILSA COX

Short Fiction in Theory and Practice 10.1

Short Fiction in Theory and Practice 10.1 contains original fiction by Zoe Lambert on the theme of illness and caring, plus co-written fiction from Amy Lilwall and Rupert Loydell. There are articles on writers including Agatha Christie, Margot Lanagan, Flannery O’Connor and Patrick Gale, plus an unpublished short story by the British writer Carl Tighe, who recently died from Covid-19, accompanied by an appreciation by Elizabeth Baines. Paul March-Russell reviews Borders and Border Crossings in the Contemporary British Short Story and Moy McCrory reviews Being Various, the anthology of new Irish Irish short stories edited by Lucy Caldwell.  And you can find out about how oral ghost stories mingle the discourse of fact and fiction.

10.2, coming early in 2021, will be a special issue on Short Fiction as Humble Fiction, and will include an interview with Sarah Hall.

Edge Hill Prize shortlist 2020.

The Edge Hill Prize 2020 for a published short story collection from the UK or Ireland has just been announced.  £10,000 will be awarded to the winner in November.  The collections are:

  • Paris Syndrome by Lucy Sweeney Byrne (Banshee Press)
  • This Paradise by Ruby Cowling (Boiler House Press)
  • What Are You Like by Shelley Day (Postbox Press)
  • Sudden Traveller by Sarah Hall (Faber)
  • This Way to Departures by Linda Mannheim (Influx Press)

Katherine Mansfield and Children: Call for Papers

KATHERINE MANSFIELD AND CHILDREN

Editors
Gerri Kimber, University of Northampton, UK
and
Todd Martin, Huntington University, USA

Virginia Woolf once remarked that Katherine Mansfield had ‘a kind of childlikeness somewhere which has been much disfigured, but still exists’. This ‘childlikeness’ is indeed a facet of Mansfield’s personality which permeates every aspect of her personal and creative life. It is present in her mature fiction, where some of her most well-known and accomplished stories, such as ‘Prelude’ and ‘At the Bay’, have children as protagonists; it is present in her early poetry, which includes a collection of poems for children intended for publication; it is also present in her juvenilia, where many of the stories she wrote from an early age for school magazines and other publications, feature children. As Tracy Miao notes of her mature fiction, ‘in Mansfield’s modelling of her child artists […] there is more than a simple “childlikeness” […] but a serious thought process on art and the artist’.

Even as an adult, Mansfield’s love of the miniature, her delight in children in general, her fascination with dolls, all feature in her personal writing. Her relationship with John Middleton Murry was characterised by their mutual descriptions of themselves as little children fighting against a corrupt world. Alluding to their innocence, Mansfield once wrote to Murry: ‘My grown up self sees us like two little children who have been turned out into the garden’. Years later, speaking of Murry’s writing, she notes, ‘Take care of yourself – my beloved child with all these wild men about throwing stones and striking’.

Essays which address any aspect of the concept of Mansfield and children will be considered for this volume. Subjects might include (but are not limited to):

• Children in Mansfield’s fiction
• Children in Mansfield’s poetry
• Mansfield’s juvenilia – poetry and /or prose
• Mansfield’s early years
• The ‘childlike’ relationship between Mansfield and Murry
• Mansfield’s pregnancies
• Mansfield’s love of the miniature
• Mansfield and dolls
• The childlike in Mansfield’s personal writing
• Mansfield’s ‘innocent eye’ (John Ruskin)

Please email submissions of c.6000 words, including endnotes, formatted in Word and in MHRA style*, 12 pt. Times New Roman, double line-spaced, with a 100-word abstract + 5 keywords & 50-word biography, to the editorial team at kms@katherinemansfieldsociety.org

PLEASE NOTE: ALL SUBMISSIONS WILL AUTOMATICALLY BE ENTERED FOR OUR ANNUAL ESSAY PRIZE COMPETITION UNLESS AUTHORS INDICATE OTHERWISE.

*An MHRA Style Guide is available on the Katherine Mansfield Society website: http://www.katherinemansfieldsociety.org/yearbook-katherine-mansfield-studies/

Creative Writing
We welcome creative submissions of poetry, short stories, and creative essays on the general theme of Katherine Mansfield. Please send submissions for consideration, accompanied by a brief (50 words) biography, to kms@katherinemansfieldsociety.org.

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS: 31 AUGUST 2020