Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Chapter 1 Introduction
- Chapter 2 The short story as ironic myth: Washington Irving and William Austin
- Chapter 3 Nathaniel Hawthorne
- Chapter 4 Edgar Allan Poe
- Chapter 5 Herman Melville
- Chapter 6 New territories: Bret Harte and Mark Twain
- Chapter 7 Realism, the grotesque and impressionism: Hamlin Garland, Ambrose Bierce and Stephen Crane
- Chapter 8 Henry James
- Chapter 9 Rebecca Harding Davis, Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman
- Chapter 10 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton and Willa Cather
- Chapter 11 Growth, fragmentation, new aesthetics and new voices in the early twentieth century
- Chapter 12 O. Henry and Jack London
- Chapter 13 Sherwood Anderson
- Chapter 14 Ernest Hemingway
- Chapter 15 F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Chapter 16 William Faulkner
- Chapter 17 Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor
- Chapter 18 Charles Chesnutt, Richard Wright, James Baldwin and the African American short story to 1965
- Chapter 19 Aspects of the American short story 1930–1980
- Chapter 20 Two traditions and the changing idea of the mainstream
- Chapter 21 The postmodern short story in America
- Chapter 22 Raymond Carver
- Chapter 23 Epilogue: the contemporary American short story
- Notes
- Guide to further reading
- Index
Chapter 2 - The short story as ironic myth: Washington Irving and William Austin
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Chapter 1 Introduction
- Chapter 2 The short story as ironic myth: Washington Irving and William Austin
- Chapter 3 Nathaniel Hawthorne
- Chapter 4 Edgar Allan Poe
- Chapter 5 Herman Melville
- Chapter 6 New territories: Bret Harte and Mark Twain
- Chapter 7 Realism, the grotesque and impressionism: Hamlin Garland, Ambrose Bierce and Stephen Crane
- Chapter 8 Henry James
- Chapter 9 Rebecca Harding Davis, Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman
- Chapter 10 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton and Willa Cather
- Chapter 11 Growth, fragmentation, new aesthetics and new voices in the early twentieth century
- Chapter 12 O. Henry and Jack London
- Chapter 13 Sherwood Anderson
- Chapter 14 Ernest Hemingway
- Chapter 15 F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Chapter 16 William Faulkner
- Chapter 17 Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor
- Chapter 18 Charles Chesnutt, Richard Wright, James Baldwin and the African American short story to 1965
- Chapter 19 Aspects of the American short story 1930–1980
- Chapter 20 Two traditions and the changing idea of the mainstream
- Chapter 21 The postmodern short story in America
- Chapter 22 Raymond Carver
- Chapter 23 Epilogue: the contemporary American short story
- Notes
- Guide to further reading
- Index
Summary
Two writers at the very beginning of the American short story tradition, Washington Irving (1783–1859) and William Austin (1778–1843), produced stories which not only constitute the foundations of a genre but also deal with the foundations of modern American society itself. Other stories by Irving and Austin approach the genre by way of Romance, parable and sketch, and prepared the ground for the greater achievement of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Irving's ‘Rip Van Winkle’ (1819) and Austin's ‘Peter Rugg, the Missing Man’ (1824) also provide paradigmatic examples of the way the short story frequently – one might almost say typically – takes a moment of crisis as its subject matter: the moment which marks a radical change in the life of an individual, a group or, as here, a whole nation. Their small handful of other stories also tend to deal with crisis, usually psychological or moral, by way of ‘Romance’ (defined by Hawthorne as ‘a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other’) or the semi-supernatural or ‘fantastic’. The term ‘tale’ was commonly used in the nineteenth century for this kind of story.
Washington Irving
Irving's ‘Rip Van Winkle’ is one of only three short stories or tales, as he more often called them, in The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819–20), a collection mostly made up of essays, sketches and anecdotes, many of which are not on American topics but grew out of Irving's travels in Britain between 1815 and 1817.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Introduction to the American Short Story , pp. 10 - 18Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006