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
29 - Comedic Short Fiction
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
The comic short story might too easily be dismissed as an appendix to a sub-genre: a lightweight variation on the novel's junior partner. In some instances this classification is well deserved, with authors making use of brevity as the opportunity to dress in respectable literary garb an extended joke or an exercise in parody. At the same time, it is possible to locate those who regard as a challenge the combining of humour that is more than trivial with the demands of a compact, pressurized narrative.
At the close of the nineteenth century short fiction was becoming established as a popular alternative to the full-length novel, and one of the first, and certainly one of the most popular, practitioners of the comic form was Barry Pain. Pain was a journalist who found that the rise of the weekly magazine, aimed mostly at the lower middle-class suburban reader, created the opportunity for literary writing that guaranteed payment by submission. This in itself was partly responsible for the consolidation of short fiction in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Such pieces could be read in a single journey by individuals commuting in and out of the city on the ever-expanding rail network, and magazines such as Cornhill, Punch and the Daily Chronicle regularly made room for stories of one to two thousand words alongside their mixture of current affairs, gossip and reviews.
Pain's most famous stories (1900–13) involve the eponymous ‘Eliza’. Their popularity has endured to the extent that in 1992 BBC 2 adapted them as ten-minute screen performances and in 2006 BBC Radio 4 followed suit with a week-long serialization. The narrator is Eliza's husband but we never learn of his first name, nor indeed of the married name he shares with Eliza, because she never uses his name in the conversations between them that make up most of the dialogue. This might seem a curious gesture on Pain's part, but we gradually discern a connection between the partial anonymity of the first-person narrator, through no fault of his own, and the general temper of the pieces. For readers with a taste for magazine fiction Eliza's husband would have been faintly familiar. In 1888–9, in Punch, George and Weedon Grossmith magnetized a considerable readership with the dull pomposity of Charles and Caroline (‘Carrie’) Pooter.
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- Information
- The Cambridge History of the English Short Story , pp. 498 - 512Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2016