SHORT STORY
A
short story is a piece of
prose fiction, which can be read in a single sitting. Emerging from earlier oral
storytelling traditions in the 17th century, the short story has grown to encompass a body of work so diverse as to defy easy characterization. At its most prototypical the short story features a small cast of named characters, and focuses on a self-contained incident with the intent of evoking a "single effect" or mood.
[1] In doing so, short stories make use of plot, resonance, and other dynamic components to a far greater degree than is typical of an
anecdote, yet to a far lesser degree than a
novel. While the short story is largely distinct from the novel, authors of both generally draw from a common pool of
literary techniques.
Short stories have no set length. In terms of word count there is no official demarcation between an
anecdote, a short story, and a novel. Rather, the form's parameters are given by the rhetorical and practical context in which a given story is produced and considered, so that what constitutes a short story may differ between genres, countries, eras, and commentators.
[2] Like the novel, the short story's predominant shape reflects the demands of the available markets for publication, and the evolution of the form seems closely tied to the evolution of the publishing industry and the submission guidelines of its constituent houses.
[3]
The short story has been considered both an apprenticeship form preceding more lengthy works, and a crafted form in its own right, collected together in books of similar length, price, and distribution as novels. Short story writers may define their works as part of the artistic and personal expression of the form. They may also attempt to resist categorization by genre and fixed formation.
Determining what exactly separates a short story from longer fictional formats is problematic. A classic definition of a short story is that one should be able to read it in one sitting, a point most notably made in
Edgar Allan Poe's
essay "
Thomas Le Moineau (Le Moile)" (1846). Interpreting this standard nowadays is problematic, since the expected length of "one sitting" may now be briefer than it was in Poe's era. Other definitions place the maximum word count of the short story at anywhere from 1,000 to 4,000. In contemporary usage, the term short story most often refers to a work of fiction no shorter than 1,000 and no longer than 20,000 words.Stories of fewer than 1,000 words are sometimes referred to as "short short stories",
[4] or "
flash fiction."
Longer stories that cannot be called novels are sometimes considered "novellas" or novelettes and, like short stories, may be collected into the more marketable form of "collections", often containing previously unpublished stories. Sometimes, authors who do not have the time or money to write a novella or novel decide to write short stories instead, working out a deal with a
popular website or
magazine to publish them for profit.
Characteristics[edit]
As a concentrated form of narrative prose fiction, the short story has been theorised through the traditional elements of
dramatic structure:
exposition (the introduction of setting, situation and main characters),
complication (the event that introduces the conflict),
rising action,
crisis (the decisive moment for the protagonist and his commitment to a course of action),
climax (the point of highest interest in terms of the conflict and the point with the most action) and
resolution (the point when the conflict is resolved). Because of their length, short stories may or may not follow this pattern. For example, modern short stories only occasionally have an exposition, more typically beginning in the middle of the action (
in medias res). As with longer stories, plots of short stories also have a climax, crisis, or turning point. However, the endings of many short stories are abrupt and open and may or may not have a moral or practical lesson. As with any art form, the exact characteristics of a short story will vary by creator. Short stories tend to be less complex than novels. Usually a short story focuses on one incident; has a single plot, a single setting, and a small number of characters; and covers a short period of time. The modern short story form emerged from
oral story-telling traditions, the brief moralistic narratives of
parables and
fables, and the prose anecdote, all of these being forms of a swiftly sketched situation that quickly comes to its point. With the rise of the
realisticnovel, the short story evolved in a parallel tradition, with some of its first distinctive examples in the tales of
E. T. A. Hoffmann. The character of the form developed particularly with authors known for their short fiction, either by choice (they wrote nothing else) or by critical regard, which acknowledged the focus and craft required in the short form. An example is
Jorge Luis Borges, who won American fame with "
The Garden of Forking Paths", published in the August 1948
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Another example is
O. Henry (author of "
Gift of the Magi"), for whom the
O. Henry Award is named. American examples include
Flannery O'Connor,
John Cheever, and
Raymond Carver.
Predecessors[edit]
Short stories date back to oral storytelling traditions which originally produced epics such as
Homer's
Iliad and
Odyssey. Oral narratives were often told in the form of rhyming or
rhythmic verse, often including recurring sections or, in the case of Homer,
Homeric epithets. Such stylistic devices often acted as
mnemonics for easier recall, rendition and adaptation of the story. Short sections of verse might focus on individual narratives that could be told at one sitting. The overall arc of the
tale would emerge only through the telling of multiple such sections.
The other ancient form of short story, the
anecdote, was popular under the
Roman Empire. Anecdotes functioned as a sort of
parable, a brief realistic narrative that embodies a point. Many surviving Roman anecdotes were collected in the 13th or 14th century as the
Gesta Romanorum. Anecdotes remained popular in Europe well into the 18th century, when the fictional anecdotal letters of Sir
Roger de Coverley were published.
In Europe, the oral story-telling tradition began to develop into written stories in the early 14th century, most notably with
Geoffrey Chaucer's
Canterbury Tales and
Giovanni Boccaccio's
Decameron. Both of these books are composed of individual short stories (which range from farce or humorous anecdotes to well-crafted literary fictions) set within a larger narrative story (a
frame story), although the frame-tale device was not adopted by all writers. At the end of the 16th century, some of the most popular short stories in Europe were the darkly tragic "
novella" of
Matteo Bandello (especially in their French translation).
The mid 17th century in France saw the development of a refined short novel, the "nouvelle", by such authors as
Madame de Lafayette. In the 1690s, traditional
fairy tales began to be published (one of the most famous collections was by
Charles Perrault). The appearance of
Antoine Galland's first modern translation of the
Thousand and One Nights (or
Arabian Nights) (from 1704; another translation appeared in 1710–12) would have an enormous influence on the 18th-century European short stories of
Voltaire,
Diderot and others.
1790–1850[edit]
There are early examples of short stories published separately between 1790 and 1810, but the first true collections of short stories appeared between 1810 and 1830 in several countries around the same period.
[6]
1850–1900[edit]
In the latter 19th century, the growth of print magazines and journals created a strong demand for short fiction of between 3,000 and 15,000 words.
The most prolific French author of short stories was
Guy de Maupassant. Stories like "
Boule de Suif" ("Ball of Fat", 1880) and "
L'Inutile Beauté" ("The Useless Beauty", 1890) are good examples of French
realism.
The prolific Indian author of short stories
Munshi Premchand, pioneered the genre in the
Hindustani language, writing a substantial body of short stories and novels in a style characterized by realism and an unsentimental and authentic introspection into the complexities of Indian society.
Premchand's work, including his over 200 short stories (such as the story "Lottery") and his novel
Godaan remain substantial works.
A master of the short story, the Urdu language writer
Saadat Hasan Manto, is revered for his exceptional depth, irony and sardonic humour. The author of some 250 short stories, radio plays, essays, reminiscences and a novel, Manto is widely admired for his analyses of violence, bigotry, prejudice and the relationships between reason and unreason. Combining realism with surrealism and irony, Manto's works such as the celebrated short story
Toba Tek Singh are aesthetic masterpieces which continue to give profound insight into the nature of human loss, violence and devastation.
In India, Rabindranath Tagore published short stories, on the lives of the poor and oppressed such as peasants, Women and villagers under colonial misrule and exploitation.
1900–1945[edit]
In Ireland,
James Joyce published his short story collection
Dubliners in 1914. These stories, written in a more accessible style than his later novels, are based on careful observation of the inhabitants of his birth city.
In the first half of the 20th century, a number of high-profile American magazines such as
The Atlantic Monthly,
Harper's Magazine,
The New Yorker,
Scribner's,
The Saturday Evening Post,
Esquire, and
The Bookman published short stories in each issue. The demand for quality short stories was so great and the money paid for such so well that
F. Scott Fitzgerald repeatedly turned to short-story (as Matthews preferred to write it) writing to pay his numerous debts. His first collection
Flappers and Philosophers appeared in book form in 1920.
William Faulkner wrote over one hundred short stories.
Go Down, Moses, a collection of seven stories, appeared in 1941.
Ernest Hemingway's concise writing style was perfectly fit for shorter fiction. Stories like "
A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" (1926), "
Hills Like White Elephants" (1927) and "
The Snows of Kilimanjaro" (1936) are only a few pages long, but carefully crafted.
Dorothy Parker's bittersweet story "Big Blonde" debuted in 1929. A popular
science fiction story is "
Nightfall" by
Isaac Asimov.
After 1945[edit]
The period following
World War II saw a great flowering of literary short fiction in the United States.
The New Yorker continued to publish the works of the form’s leading mid-century practitioners, including
Shirley Jackson, whose story, "
The Lottery", published in 1948, elicited the strongest response in the magazine’s history to that time. Other frequent contributors during the last 1940s included
John Cheever,
John Steinbeck,
Jean Stafford, and
Eudora Welty.
J. D. Salinger's
Nine Stories (1953) experimented with point of view and voice, while
Flannery O'Connor's story "
A Good Man is Hard to Find" (1955) reinvigorated the
Southern Gothic style. Cultural and social identity played a considerable role in much of the short fiction of the 1960s.
Philip Roth and
Grace Paley cultivated distinctive Jewish-American voices.
Tillie Olsen’s "
I Stand Here Ironing" (1961) adopted a consciously feminist perspective.
James Baldwin’s collection
Going to Meet the Man (1965) told stories of African-American life.
Frank O'Connor’s
The Lonely Voice, an exploration of the short story, appeared in 1963.
Wallace Stegner's short stories are primarily set in the American West.
Stephen King published many short stories in men's magazines in the 1960s and after. The 1970s saw the rise of the postmodern short story in the works of
Donald Barthelme and
John Barth. Traditionalists including
John Updike and
Joyce Carol Oates maintained significant influence on the form.
Minimalism gained widespread influence in the 1980s, most notably in the work of
Raymond Carver and
Ann Beattie.
In Brazil, the short story became popular among female writers like
Clarice Lispector,
Lygia Fagundes Telles,
Adélia Prado, who wrote about their society from a feminine viewpoint, although the genre has great male writers like
Dalton Trevisan,
Autran Dourado Moacyr Scliar and
Carlos Heitor Cony too. Also, writing about poverty and the
favelas,
João Antonio became a well known writer. Other post-modern short fiction authors include writers
Hilda Hilst and
Caio Fernando Abreu. Detective literature was led by
Rubem Fonseca. It is also necessary to mention
João Guimarães Rosa, wrote short stories in the book
Sagarana using a complex, experimental language based on tales of oral traditional.
The
Egyptian Nobel Prize-winner Naguib Mafouz is the most well-known author from his country, but has only a few short stories.
sumber dari wiki
