Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

This volume is aimed at a wide readership – students, teachers and scholars, and whoever is interested in the serious discussion of the British and Irish short story. The volume is divided into two parts. Part I covers the period 1880 to 1945, Part II that of 1945 to the present. The decision to start the coverage of the development of the short story in Britain and Ireland after 1880 is based on the scholarly consensus that, while early nineteenth-century and high-Victorian authors wrote short fiction, they neither took it very seriously nor thought about it in any focused manner. There seems to have been little consciousness in mid-Victorian Britain or Ireland (as opposed to the situation in the USA) of the short story as a discrete kind of text with substantial artistic potential. The fluid social and cultural climate of the late nineteenth century, however, provided fertile ground for an explosion in short-story production and thinking about the short story in Britain and Ireland. The starting point of 1945 for Part II also immediately suggested itself. World War II is a major watershed in British history; at its end Elizabeth Bowen (wrongly, as it turned out) foresaw a glowing new future for short fiction in the post-war world; political, economic, and cultural developments beginning in the late 1940s have created a context for British and Irish writers in the early twenty-first ... log in or subscribe to read full text