Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- A Note on the Texts
- Introduction
- 1 Early-Modern Diversity: The Origins of English Short Fiction
- 2 Short Prose Narratives of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
- 3 Gothic and Victorian Supernatural Tales
- 4 The Victorian Potboiler: Novelists Writing Short Stories
- 5 Fable, Myth and Folk Tale: The Writing of Oral and Traditional Story Forms
- 6 The Colonial Short Story, Adventure and the Exotic
- 7 The Yellow Book Circle and the Culture of the Literary Magazine
- 8 The Modernist Short Story: Fractured Perspectives
- 9 War Stories: The Short Story in the First and Second World Wars
- 10 The Short Story in Ireland to 1945: A National Literature
- 11 The Short Story in Ireland since 1945: A Modernizing Tradition
- 12 The Short Story in Scotland: From Oral Tale to Dialectal Style
- 13 The Short Story in Wales: Cultivated Regionalism
- 14 The Understated Art, English Style
- 15 The Rural Tradition in the English Short Story
- 16 Metropolitan Modernity: Stories of London
- 17 Gender and Genre: Short Fiction, Feminism and Female Experience
- 18 Queer Short Stories: An Inverted History
- 19 Stories of Jewish Identity: Survivors, Exiles and Cosmopolitans
- 20 New Voices: Multicultural Short Stories
- 21 Settler Stories: Postcolonial Short Fiction
- 22 After Empire: Postcolonial Short Fiction and the Oral Tradition
- 23 Ghost Stories and Supernatural Tales
- 24 The Detective Story: Order from Chaos
- 25 Frontiers: Science Fiction and the British Marketplace
- 26 Weird Stories: The Potency of Horror and Fantasy
- 27 Experimentalism: Self-Reflexive and Postmodernist Stories
- 28 Satirical Stories: Estrangement and Social Critique
- 29 Comedic Short Fiction
- 30 Short Story Cycles: Between the Novel and the Story Collection
- 31 The Novella: Between the Novel and the Story
- 32 The Short Story Visualized: Adaptations and Screenplays
- 33 The Short Story Anthology: Shaping the Canon
- 34 The Institution of Creative Writing
- 35 Short Story Futures
- Select Bibliography
- Index
- References
9 - War Stories: The Short Story in the First and Second World Wars
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 November 2016
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- A Note on the Texts
- Introduction
- 1 Early-Modern Diversity: The Origins of English Short Fiction
- 2 Short Prose Narratives of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
- 3 Gothic and Victorian Supernatural Tales
- 4 The Victorian Potboiler: Novelists Writing Short Stories
- 5 Fable, Myth and Folk Tale: The Writing of Oral and Traditional Story Forms
- 6 The Colonial Short Story, Adventure and the Exotic
- 7 The Yellow Book Circle and the Culture of the Literary Magazine
- 8 The Modernist Short Story: Fractured Perspectives
- 9 War Stories: The Short Story in the First and Second World Wars
- 10 The Short Story in Ireland to 1945: A National Literature
- 11 The Short Story in Ireland since 1945: A Modernizing Tradition
- 12 The Short Story in Scotland: From Oral Tale to Dialectal Style
- 13 The Short Story in Wales: Cultivated Regionalism
- 14 The Understated Art, English Style
- 15 The Rural Tradition in the English Short Story
- 16 Metropolitan Modernity: Stories of London
- 17 Gender and Genre: Short Fiction, Feminism and Female Experience
- 18 Queer Short Stories: An Inverted History
- 19 Stories of Jewish Identity: Survivors, Exiles and Cosmopolitans
- 20 New Voices: Multicultural Short Stories
- 21 Settler Stories: Postcolonial Short Fiction
- 22 After Empire: Postcolonial Short Fiction and the Oral Tradition
- 23 Ghost Stories and Supernatural Tales
- 24 The Detective Story: Order from Chaos
- 25 Frontiers: Science Fiction and the British Marketplace
- 26 Weird Stories: The Potency of Horror and Fantasy
- 27 Experimentalism: Self-Reflexive and Postmodernist Stories
- 28 Satirical Stories: Estrangement and Social Critique
- 29 Comedic Short Fiction
- 30 Short Story Cycles: Between the Novel and the Story Collection
- 31 The Novella: Between the Novel and the Story
- 32 The Short Story Visualized: Adaptations and Screenplays
- 33 The Short Story Anthology: Shaping the Canon
- 34 The Institution of Creative Writing
- 35 Short Story Futures
- Select Bibliography
- Index
- References
Summary
As a result of two wars, H. E. Bates claimed, the modern short story of his time was better than it had been ever before. Short story writer and anthologist Dan Davin felt that the short story ‘proved to be one of the hardiest blooms to survive in a time of devastation and weeds’. But why is the short story such a useful medium to writers in wartime? The particular conditions of publishing in wartime, from paper shortages to editorial constraints, seem to encourage the publication of short fiction in periodicals over the individual publication of long novels. The short story has also been described as a medium that ‘lends itself to the representation of experience fragmented by war’. Its brevity, its ability to capture snapshot views of life at war, and particularly its modernist, fragmented incarnation have been regarded as ideal means of expression in wartime, responding quickly to events, whether traumatic or mundane, without having to offer a panoramic overview. Compared to the larger-scale explorations of war novels and memoirs, the war story's ‘strength is its affinity to the experience of the mere moment, which goes hand in hand with a special closeness to its moment of publication and reception’. A time-strapped and anxious reading public may have turned to short stories because they ‘could at least be read quickly, in a single sitting’, offered ‘the satisfaction of immediate closure’, and did not require the same ‘lengthy emotional investment’ as novels. These qualities were not obviously new: they were pre-existing features that had made the short story popular with an increasingly literate British public before 1914. When the First World War broke out, the short story was an established (if notoriously ill-defined) form that happened to work particularly well within a wartime context of readers’ limited time, constant physical or emotional disruption, paper shortages and fragmented experience. These ostensible handicaps for the literary market in general all served to make the short prose form ‘an inescapable element of the wartime literary field’ and blackouts and the dangers of leaving the house after dark owing to lack of street lighting in both wars meant that ‘Reading – like knitting – flourished on the Home Front.’
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge History of the English Short Story , pp. 152 - 167Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2016