Modern Short Stories [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION The short story is one of the oldest forms of literature— perhaps the oldest of all. It probably originated around primitive camp fires, when hunters described, with unconscious art and imaginative emphasis, their deeds of the day. It found more formal expression in the classical fables and in some of the tales of the Old Testament and Apocrypha. In the Middle Ages it flowered in many different pastures. Later, the Renaissance gave birth to the novella, which is exemplified by the Decameron of Boccaccio. From this model came the French conte, and such collections of stories in English as William Painter's The Palace of Pleasure. During the last fifty years, however, the short story has developed in scope and variety more rapidly than during the preceding five centuries. There is no other form of imaginative writing in which the twentieth century has discovered so many new possibilities of art, interpretation of life, and entertainment. Some of the reasons for this sudden development of the short story are bound up with the development of fiction in general. The vast expansion of the reading public and the rise of the circulating library have caused so many minds—and so many more pens—to grapple with the technique of the novel that fiction has discovered a hundred and one new tricks and methods. All of these have become part of the equipment of the short-story writer. The short story, however, has also made rapid growth in its own particular territory. During the eighteenth century it was not a popular form of writing, and in the earlier part of the nineteenth century it was regarded primarily as an abbreviated novel—as something for a novelist to toy with when not engaged on full-scale work. At the end of the nineteenth century, however, writers of talent and enterprise began to realize that the short story presented problems of story-telling and composition that v