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Short Story Cycle
A short story cycle (sometimes referred to as a story sequence or composite novel) is a collection of short stories in which the narratives are specifically composed and arranged with the goal of creating an enhanced or different experience when reading the group as a whole as opposed to its individual parts. Short story cycles are different from novels because the parts that would make up the chapters can all stand alone as short stories, each individually containing a beginning, middle and conclusion. When read as a group there is a tension created between the ideas of the individual stories, often showing changes that have occurred over time or highlighting the conflict between two opposing concepts or thoughts. Because of this dynamic, the stories need to have an awareness of what the other stories accomplish; therefore, cycles are usually written with the express purpose of creating a cycle as opposed to being gathered and arranged later. Definitional debates Scholars have ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Short Story
A short story is a piece of prose fiction. It can typically be read in a single sitting and focuses on a self-contained incident or series of linked incidents, with the intent of evoking a single effect or mood. The short story is one of the oldest types of literature and has existed in the form of legends, Myth, mythic tales, Folklore genre, folk tales, fairy tales, tall tales, fables, and anecdotes in various ancient communities around the world. The modern short story developed in the early 19th century. Definition The short story is a crafted form in its own right. Short stories make use of plot, resonance and other dynamic components as in a novel, but typically to a lesser degree. While the short story is largely distinct from the novel or novella, novella/short novel, authors generally draw from a common pool of literary techniques. The short story is sometimes referred to as a genre. Determining what exactly defines a short story remains problematic. A classic definition ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Canterbury Tales
''The Canterbury Tales'' () is a collection of 24 stories written in Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer between 1387 and 1400. The book presents the tales, which are mostly written in verse, as part of a fictional storytelling contest held by a group of pilgrims travelling together from London to Canterbury to visit the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. The ''Tales'' are widely regarded as Chaucer's '' magnum opus''. They had a major effect upon English literature and may have been responsible for the popularisation of the English vernacular in mainstream literature, as opposed to French or Latin. English had, however, been used as a literary language centuries before Chaucer's time, and several of Chaucer's contemporaries— John Gower, William Langland, the Gawain Poet, and Julian of Norwich—also wrote major literary works in English. It is unclear to what extent Chaucer was seminal in this evolution of literary preference. ''The Canterbury Tale ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The New Mestiza
''The'' is a grammatical article in English, denoting nouns that are already or about to be mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite article in English. ''The'' is the most frequently used word in the English language; studies and analyses of texts have found it to account for seven percent of all printed English-language words. It is derived from gendered articles in Old English which combined in Middle English and now has a single form used with nouns of any gender. The word can be used with both singular and plural nouns, and with a noun that starts with any letter. This is different from many other languages, which have different forms of the definite article for different genders or numbers. Pronunciation In most dialects, "the" is pronounced as (with the voiced dental fricative followed by a schwa) when followed by a consonant sound, and as (homophone of the archaic pronoun ''thee'' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Love Medicine
''Love Medicine'' is Louise Erdrich's debut novel, first published in 1984 by Holt. Erdrich revised and expanded the novel in subsequent 1993 and 2009 editions. The book follows the lives of five interconnected Ojibwe families living on fictional reservations in Minnesota and North Dakota. The collection of short stories in the book spans six decades from the 1930s to the 1980s. ''Love Medicine'' garnered critical praise and won numerous awards, including the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award. Plot summary ''Love Medicine'' follows the intertwining lives of three central families, the Kashpaws, Lamartines, and Morrisseys, and two peripheral families, the Pillagers and the Lazarres.Kurup, Seema. ''Understanding Louise Erdrich''. University of South Carolina Press, 2016. pp. 4 Members of the families variously reside on the fictional Ojibwe reservations of Little No Horse and Hoopdance, and in Minneapolis- St.Paul and Fargo. Erdrich employs a non-linear format in ''Love Med ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
In Our Time (short Story Collection)
''In Our Time'' is the title of Ernest Hemingway's first collection of short stories, published in 1925 by Boni & Liveright, New York, and of a collection of vignettes published in 1924 in France titled ''in our time''. Its title is derived from the English ''Book of Common Prayer'', "Give peace in our time, O Lord". The collection's publication history was complex. It began with six prose vignettes published by Ezra Pound in the 1923 edition of ''The Little Review'', to which Hemingway added twelve vignettes and had published in Paris in 1924 as the in our time edition (with a lower-case title). He wrote fourteen short stories for the 1925 edition, including " Indian Camp" and "Big Two-Hearted River", two of his best-known Nick Adams stories. He composed " On the Quai at Smyrna" for the 1930 edition. The stories' themes – of alienation, loss, grief, separation – continue the work Hemingway began with the vignettes, which include descriptions of acts of war, bu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Julio Cortázar
Julio Florencio Cortázar (26 August 1914 – 12 February 1984; ) was an Argentine and naturalised French novelist, short story writer, poet, essayist, and translator. Known as one of the founders of the Latin American Boom, Cortázar influenced an entire generation of Spanish-speaking readers and writers in America and Europe. He is considered to be one of the most innovative and original authors of his time, a master of history, poetic prose, and short stories as well as the author of many groundbreaking novels, a prolific author who inaugurated a new way of making literature in the Hispanic world by breaking classical molds. He is perhaps best known as the author of multiple narratives that attempt to defy the temporal linearity of traditional literature. Cortázar lived his childhood, adolescence, and incipient maturity in Argentina. In 1951, he settled in France for what would prove to be more than three decades. However, he also lived in Italy, Spain, and Switzerlan ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Woman Warrior
''The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts'' is a book written by Chinese American author Maxine Hong Kingston and published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1976. The book blends autobiography with old Chinese Folklore, folktales. ''The Woman Warrior'' won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named one of TIME magazine, ''TIME'' magazine's top nonfiction books of the 1970s. Genre The specific genre of ''The Woman Warrior'' has been disputed due to Kingston's blend of perspectives, specifically traditional Chinese folklore, Chinese folktale and memoir. With this mixture, Kingston tries to provide her audience with the cultural, familial, and personal context needed to understand her unique position as a first-generation Chinese-American woman. Susan Stanford Friedman's assessment of autobiography with regard to women and minority groups explains Kingston's intricate blend of perspective and genre: women and cultural minorities often don't have the privilege of vi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cosmicomics
''Cosmicomics'' () is a collection of twelve short stories by Italo Calvino first published in Italian in 1965 and in English in 1968. The stories were originally published between 1964 and 1965 in the Italian periodicals ''Il Caffè'' and ''Il Giorno''. Each story takes a scientific theory (some of which have since become deprecated) or phenomenon and builds an imaginative story around it. An always-extant being called Qfwfq explicitly narrates all of the stories save two. Every story is a memory of an event in the history of the universe. All of the stories in ''Cosmicomics'', together with more of Qfwfq stories from '' t zero'' and other sources, are now available in a single volume collection, '' The Complete Cosmicomics'' (Penguin UK, 2009). The first U.S. edition, translated by William Weaver, won the National Book Award in the Translation category. [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Women Of Brewster Place (novel)
''The Women of Brewster Place'' (1982) is the debut novel of United States, American author Gloria Naylor. It won the National Book Award in category First Novel."National Book Awards – 1983" National Book Foundation. Retrieved February 28, 2012. (With acceptance speech by Naylor and essays by Rachel Helgeson and Felicia Pride from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog.) • First novels or first works of fiction were recognized from 1980 to 1985. It was adapted as the 1989 miniseries ''The Women of Brewster Place (1989 television), The Women of Brewster Place'' and the 1990 television show ''Brewster Place'' by Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Productions. ''The Women'' explores the lives of seven Black women who all live at Brewster Place, a tenement building in the poorer parts of an unnamed US c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dubliners
''Dubliners'' is a collection of fifteen short stories by James Joyce, first published in 1914. It presents a naturalistic depiction of Irish middle class life in and around Dublin in the early years of the 20th century. The stories were written when Irish nationalism was at its peak, and a search for a national identity and purpose was raging; at a crossroads of history and culture, Ireland was jolted by various converging ideas and influences. Joyce felt Irish nationalism, like Catholicism and British rule of Ireland, was responsible for a collective paralysis. He conceived of ''Dubliners'' as a "nicely polished looking-glass" held up to the Irish and a "first step towards heirspiritual liberation". Joyce's concept of epiphany is exemplified in the moment a character experiences self-understanding or illumination. The first three stories in the collection are narrated by child protagonists, while the subsequent stories are written in the third person and deal with the liv ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Country Of The Pointed Firs
''The Country of the Pointed Firs'' is an 1896 book by American writer Sarah Orne Jewett. It is considered by some literary critics to be her finest work. Plot The narrator, a Bostonian, returns after a brief visit a few summers prior, to the small coastal town of Dunnet, Maine, in order to finish writing her book. Upon arriving she settles in with Almira Todd, a widow in her sixties and the local apothecary and herbalist. The narrator occasionally assists Mrs. Todd with her frequent callers, but this distracts her from her writing and she seeks a room of her own. Renting an empty schoolhouse with a broad view of Dunnet Landing, the narrator can apparently concentrate on her writing, although Jewett does not use the schoolhouse to show the narrator at work but rather in meditation and receiving company. The schoolhouse is one of many locations in the novel which Jewett elevates to mythic significance and for the narrator the location is a center of writerly consciousness from ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Modernist Literature
Modernist literature originated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and is characterised by a self-conscious separation from traditional ways of writing in both poetry and prose fiction writing. Modernism experimented with literary form and expression, as exemplified by Ezra Pound's maxim to "Make it new". This literary movement was driven by a conscious desire to overturn traditional modes of representation and express the new sensibilities of the time. The immense human costs of the First World War saw the prevailing assumptions about society reassessed, and much modernist writing engages with the technological advances and societal changes of modernity moving into the 20th century. In ''Modernist Literature'', Mary Ann Gillies notes that these literary themes share the "centrality of a conscious break with the past", one that "emerges as a complex response across continents and disciplines to a changing world". Modernism, Romanticism, Philosophy and Symbol Literary mo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
