Less dependent than the novel on the containing medium of the book (codex), the short story has an inherent power to move between different media – the magazine, the spoken word, the anthology, the story cycle, etc. This chapter examines how this transmedial power has impacted the form and content of the short story from the early nineteenth century to the present day. In particular, we examine the impact on the short story of the magazine; the creative writing program; the technology of photography; the spoken voice; and the audio tape. We see how transmediation informs themes such as literary commercialization and craft, and techniques such as realism and metafiction. The authors discussed include Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, O. Henry, Ernest Hemingway, Nam Le, Jennifer Egan, Eudora Welty, Charles Chesnutt, Ted Chiang, John Barth, Elizabeth Tallent, and Jenn Alandy Trahan.

This chapter examines the literary institutions that helped American short fiction to flourish in the twentieth century and maintain its visibility today. These institutions, from the Best American Short Stories and the New Yorker, to the Pushcart Prize and the National Book Award, form a kind of patchwork canon of American short fiction, a record of the writers most celebrated in their moment and most remembered since. Despite the persistent notion, espoused by artists and scholars alike, that the short story is “the art form best suited for the description” of a diverse and “heterogeneous culture,” these institutions also testify to the fact that the genre has, until very recently, underrepresented women and overlooked racialized writers. This chapter documents the writers that these organizations have consecrated, examining how that patchwork canon has often failed to live up to the ideals of cultural pluralism at the heart of the American short story tradition.

The short story became a popular form among twentieth-century working-class writers, who faced challenges in maintaining a literary career while short on time and energy. Meridel Le Sueur, Tillie Olsen, Raymond Carver, and Bobby Ann Mason also found the short story to be an effective form for representing the experiences of those who were alienated within US society. This chapter argues that the comparably abrupt and disconnected nature of the short story parallels an aesthetic of disconnectedness that is prevalent in the work of these four writers, each of whom portrays working-class life as alienated from the mainstream culture, and whose characters are often emotionally stunted as a result. While the later writings of Carver and Mason reduce the earlier emphasis on economics and class struggle found in Olsen and, especially, Le Sueur, they all share a sense of the emotional damage caused by being working class in the United States.

This chapter examines the reception of romance in medieval Italy, focusing on the way in which Italian writers engaged with the form and content of the genre. It examines different modes of adaptation through the lens of three texts from different Italian-speaking communities and time periods. Firstly, the Franco-Venetian Prophecies de Merlin demonstrates the hybrid character of Italian romance, which combines French and Italian language and perspectives – in this case, to incorporate Italian interests in political prophecy into the Arthurian story. The Tuscan Tavola Ritonda characterizses Italian-vernacular adaptations of French prose cycles, combining ideals of chivalric heroism with civic values to resignify Tristan’s status as the perfect knight. Finally, the late medieval Ferrarese L’Inamoramento de Orlando by Matteo Maria Boiardo draws on the Italian cantari in its incorporation of romance themes and forms alongside chanson de geste. Italian medieval romance emerges as a malleable and porous genre that is always in dialogue with other genres and cultural perspectives.

Since Edgar Allan Poe’s assertion that the short story must be read in a “single sitting,” short story theory has focused on the importance of endings as a hallmark of the form. This crystallized, in the 1980s and 1990s, in the rise of closure studies, a critical field that sought to taxonomize the ways stories end and its effects on the reader. This essay examines a feminist countertradition of short story writing that uses grammar as a tool to disrupt the form’s inbuilt narrative teleology. By interrogating the short story’s narrative temporality, writers such as Gertrude Stein, Lydia Davis, and Lorrie Moore use grammar to situate themselves, in distinctly gendered ways, in and against broader systems of time. Through a close examination of these writers, the essay explores how grammar offers a way of assessing not only the short story’s closures but also its various expansions and radical possibilities.

Romance was created in twelfth-century England and France for aristocratic patrons and audiences whose courtly lifestyle it idealized and celebrated; as the earliest genre to celebrate love as life’s goal, it was revolutionary. Initially translating Latin sources, romance authors innovatively combined pre-existing genres: classical epic’s historical drive was disrupted by the lyric’s focus on individual emotional experience, creating a new kind of narrative fiction. Where earlier heroes had sacrificed their lives fighting for great causes, the romance hero suffers and fights to prove his worthiness to a beloved, and wins marriage, wealth, and reputation as confirmation of his value. Here the fictional genre betrays its real-world ideological role: to justify the patriarchal, misogynistic, exploitative and exclusionary structures of aristocratic chivalric society, representing – literally romanticizing – its values as morally admirable. Within decades the romance took multiple paths: in the creation of pseudohistorical heroes and legendary pasts; in the limitless proliferation of fictional quests from King Arthur’s court; and in parody and critique, such as Chrétien de Troyes’s helplessly subservient Lancelot, or Marie de France’s assertive female protagonists. Finally, Thomas of Britain’s Tristan transforms the romance into tragedy, another new development in this most capacious and influential genre, forerunner of the novel.

Romances’ formal innovations and authorial self-consciousness are studied from another angle by Sylvie Lefèvre, who examines the variety of authorial framing techniques and narratorial interventions in French romance. Although we possess little information about historical authors before the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, many stories call attention to their creators, sometimes billed as an “acteur,” who can assert himself (or, more rarely, herself) in numerous guises: as an omniscient narrator who animates the dialogue of characters; as a parallel persona who compares his amorous affair to that of his characters; as an intradiegetic narrator who plays a role inside the story beside the characters; as a full-blown amorous persona himself, who describes the progress of his affair; or as a pseudohistorical agent based on a historical author from the previous century. Whether in verse or prose, in intradiegetic or extradiegetic narration, romances proved fertile ground for artistry, experimentation, and innovation, first in French and later in other European traditions. While some authors remain firmly entrenched inside the fiction of their creations, others created bridges to “real” incidents beyond the tale, blurring the distinction between fiction and history in ways that anticipate the modern novel.

The story of the medieval Romance on the Iberian Peninsula is a bit more complicated than that we read in traditional histories of Spanish or Catalan literature. Hebrew and Arabic authors also wrote texts that could be classified as romances some years before the Castilian Grail and Amadís. These authors adapted the motifs of Arthurian or chivalric romance, combining them with the literary tropes and conventions familiar to them from Hebrew and Arabic traditions. Others, such as the anonymous author of Cavallero Zifar (Castilian, anonymous, ca. 1300) and Ramon Llull in his ecclesisastical Romance, Blaquerna (Catalan), transform the conventions of romance to suit their own ecclesiastical and spiritual purposes. In this way, if we imagine romance in Iberia less as a stable genre with a canon and more as a set of conventions and tropes that authors recombined in novel ways, we see it as a literary practice that crosses languages and religious groups, but that in some ways shares chivalric and literary values across these differences.

It is difficult to reconstruct and analyze the relationship between romances and their historical contexts, especially because of the power of modern myths about chivalry. There was no single age of chivalry that stretched from the eleventh or twelfth centuries to the fifteenth century and beyond, and there was no single code or ideal for how aristocrats should behave during that period. Societies and cultures inevitably changed over time, and there were important geographical variations across the different regions, lands, and linguistic contexts that today form Western Europe. Therefore, medieval romances must be considered against the specific historical contexts in which they were produced and read. This chapter focuses on examples and case studies drawn from fourteenth- and fifteenth-century France and England, a period that has often been dismissed as one of chivalric decline. Yet radical changes in warfare, aristocratic class, and identity, as well as lay literacy and engagement with book ownership and writing created a dynamic context for the production and consumption of chivalric texts of all kinds.

The short story is the product of print culture but is finding new ways to thrive in the internet era. This can be through print stories going viral online or, more experimentally, born-digital stories reconfiguring relationships between author, text, and reader. This chapter considers two main subcategories of born-digital short fiction. Microfictions are self-contained flash fictions predicated on absolute verbal economy. Commonly found on Twitter, they call on longer print histories of microfictional experimentation and the francophone journalistic tradition of faits-divers. The second subcategory, microserializations, drip-feeds a narrative across multiple tweets, as in Jennifer Egan’s “Black Box.” Here too the subgenre recalls earlier traditions of nineteenth-century periodical serialization and Japanese cellphone novels (keitai shosetsu). Microserializations thus reintroduce the concept of temporality into the consumption of fiction, reviving readerly anticipation and creator–audience interactivity. Digital culture thus provides exciting new horizons for the always mobile, innately transmedial short story genre.

The chapter explores the emergence of the American short story in the context of a “culture of wonder” that dominated the Atlantic world of print prior to Washington Irving. Although ghost stories, and tales of apparitions and witchcraft were often discarded as formless pieces, these “small tales” were widely reprinted in the pages of early transatlantic magazines, fostering sensational effects as well as transgressive stories about individuals whose behavior was outside the norm. The chapter examines the circulation of early short narratives in the context of serialized imprints such as magazines and newspapers. It focuses on popular topics such as ghost stories and sensationalistic tales. Moreover, the chapter unearths the rich archive of transatlantic storytelling, demonstrating how the short form combines oral and textual performances conditioning the nineteenth-century tale as it can be found in the writings of Washington Irving and Edgar Allan Poe.

To survey the field of medieval English and European romance is to witness the remarkable elasticity of a narrative genre that came from an irrepressible urge to tell and retell stories in new languages, with shifting themes, adapted into particular forms, and transmuted into new versions for different geographic, social, and political contexts. The term “romance” applies to a vast domain of texts, which were produced throughout Britain, Europe, and the Mediterranean world, as far west as Wales, as far east as Byzantium, from Scotland to Italy and Spain, from the twelfth century to the early modern period and even later.

From the local color boom to university multiculturalism, the minority short story has been central to transformations bringing new classes of writers and content into American letters. This chapter outlines the promises and failures of the form to racially democratize the literary marketplace. It highlights the possibilities minority writers developed within these limitations. Zora Neale Hurston, Zitkála-Šá, and Winnifred Eaton deflected White audiences and their ethnographic expectations. Their frame tales challenged framings by White gatekeepers. Their feints force scholars to rethink autoethnographic fictions as savvy ethnographies of White audiences. These strategies persist in the multicultural era with writers such as Rattawut Lapcharoensap and Edward P. Jones. However, the short story has shifted from a commercial to an educational form: the easily teachable nugget of diversity. Meanwhile, audiences for ethnic authenticity now include many highly educated minorities. Sandra Cisneros, Nam Le, and others navigate this shifting map, revealing new freedoms and constraints.

Even when valorized for a political imagination that drew attention to the marginalized spaces and communities of a rapidly changing postbellum United States, regionalism (or “local color”) literature was long considered to be merely minor: written from and about sites marginal to the centers of culture and power, primarily by women, and appearing most prominently in the modest form of the short story or sketch. This essay reframes the regionalist short story through a renewed attention to its environmental representation, especially by attending to the genre’s questions of scale: the relation between region, nation, and globe; modernity and its relationship to a preindustrial past; the limitations and constraints of a minor form. Through discussions of Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Murfree, Bret Harte, and others, this essay argues that the regionalist short story’s environmental imagination decenters the human, while also revealing the co-constitution of a region and its literary archive.