Do short stories cohere into a genre, different from other prose fiction, merely by virtue of their length, or, as some critics have argued, are there narrative and thematic differences that go beyond the question of how long they are? In this chapter, we turn to Digital Humanities methods to explore these questions in a corpus of around 10,000 short stories published in twentieth-century women’s magazines. As we analyze the deployment of characters, the narrative patterns, and the linguistic variety of the short stories in our corpus, we reveal the ways that these popular short stories trace a new history of short story writing. The constraints of “mere” length, our analysis shows, allow short fiction to develop a new kind of narrative, one different from that of the novel. Rather than simply a side-effect of the genre, the shortness of the short story is fundamental to understanding its narrative possibilities.

This chapter details the literary history of short fiction written in English by African Americans from 1853 through 1934. Beginning in the antebellum era during the age of reform and continuing through the Postbellum–Pre-Harlem era before concluding with the Harlem Renaissance or New Negro Movement, this article traces the aims and goals of activists, artists, and reformers such as Frederick Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, Nella Larsen, Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, and Langston Hughes, contextualizing and contrasting their efforts to revise and critique the reductive depictions of African American life perceived within the dominant literary trends of their respective times.

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.

This chapter reviews how verse and prose romances in French and other Western European vernaculars developed through formal experimentation. Emphasizing the skill with which verse writers negotiated formal choices, the chapter analyses in detail the octosyllabic rhyming couplet that became the most common verse romance meter in several languages, before outlining the surprising variety of forms that distinguished Middle English romance. The complex relationship of form to genre – romance, epic, and lyric – in different linguistic and cultural contexts is also discussed, as is the virtuoso practice of inserting lyrics into verse romance narratives. The second half of the chapter describes the genesis and spread of romance writing in prose, now so ordinary as to seem a nonform, but once radically innovative and carrying a particular ideological freight. It analyses the “myth of prose,” which allowed prose romance writers to claim a truthfulness and objectivity for their form that they denied to verse. In spite of such claims, verse romance was nevertheless preferred in some languages and cultural contexts.

Medieval romance, from the perspective of critical race studies (CRS), justifies medieval imperial expansion. Medieval romances frame themselves as celebrating the culture of elite knights and ladies by imagining their borders as inhabited by dangerous people who must be defeated and eliminated, with the result that enemy territories are subsumed into the territories of the elite knight. From this viewpoint, medieval romance uses chivalry to define who is accepted within the boundaries and who is left out of that formation. By studying differing patters of dehumanization in medieval romance with a focus on Old French and Middle Welsh texts, the chapter shows some examples of the ways that the genre of romance makes race and of how the repercussions of making race further systems of oppression. The chapter’s aims, then, are to use CRS to show a possible form of analyzing race in medieval romance.

The late twelfth century witnessed the emergence of the Middle High German courtly romance, first introduced by Hartmann von Aue, who translated primarily Erec and Iwein from his French sources by Chrétien de Troyes. Other poets soon followed suit, especially Wolfram von Eschenbach, Gottfried von Strassburg, and The Stricker. These romances competed with the traditional bridal-quest verse narratives, and also with contemporary heroic epics, but soon established themselves independently. The thirteenth century witnessed a considerable expansion of the genre, though many romances either turned into more sentimental narratives or imitated much of the ‘classical’ poets from around 1200. In the late Middle Ages, the verse romance was substituted by prose novels, often simply technical adaptations of the traditional courtly narratives (then also printed). However, in the fifteenth century some of those early novels were predicated on innovative themes and reflected the changes of time.

Much can be learned about medieval romances by examining the manuscripts in which they are transmitted. The practical necessity of reading medieval texts in modern critical editions distances them from our only tangible contact with their historical contexts. Few, if any, romances survive in copies dating from a period near their date of composition, so the history of manuscript context is a history of reception. This chapter concentrates on Old French romance, with brief discussion of Middle English, Middle High German, Middle Dutch, and Old Norse. Consideration of the mise en texte, mise en page, and mise en livre of some major works and books which contain them, permits the construction of a model by which medieval romance may be approached in manuscript. Romances discussed include the Arthurian romances of Chrétien de Troyes and his epigones, the romans d’antiquité and other romans courtois. Briefer mention is made of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the unique manuscript of Malory; the Tristan of Gottfried von Straßburg and the Parzival of Wolfram von Eschenbach; and the texts of the Lancelot-Compilatie.

This chapter provides a brief overview of the development of crusading practices in Europe from the eleventh century until their formal end in the seventeenth. It highlights crusading’s broad impact on society, its inconsistent racial and religious discrimination, and the appeal of its story of loss and recovery across social levels. The chapter then discusses two popular Middle English romances, Richard Coeur de Lion (c. 1300) and Guy of Warwick (c. 1330), to illustrate the ways crusading affected and was affected by literary narratives. The two poems represent different kinds of crusading practices – the large army sponsored by ecclesiastical authorities and the individual undertaking a personal vow without church involvement – while offering critical commentary on crusading itself. These crusading romances and others like them situate the British Isles as part of a larger premodern world engaged in religious conflict and exchange. By recognizing the long relationship between the romance and holy warfare – one that lasted well into the early modern period – we can better understand the interests of medieval and Renaissance audiences as well as the foundational role of religious intolerance in modernity.

This chapter traces a history of Native American short stories, from oral narratives to written short stories infused with retellings of Indigenous oral tales reflecting Native values: close relationships with language, land, human and non-human communities, ancestors, and the sacred. Rather than focus on defining the short story as a genre, Native writers tend to focus on story itself, especially the centrality, power, and life-shaping capacities of story. The earliest short stories were embedded in autobiographies, ethnographies, sermons, etc., but became more standalone stories over time. The long tradition of stories in a primarily realist mode has been joined by speculative fiction, science fiction, horror stories, children’s stories, Young Adult stories, and graphic narratives. Native short stories, including interlinked story cycles, critique settler-colonialism, document historical trauma, present Indigenous alternatives to imposed historical narratives, and offer new possibilities for Native continuance.

This chapter demonstrates the seriousness and the versatility of the romance genre in the hands of two important late medieval English writers. Examples from the writings of fourteenth-century poet, Geoffrey Chaucer, and fifteenth-century translator and editor, Thomas Malory, reveal romance to be a fictionalizing genre capable of probing serious matters of broad political, social, ethical, or aesthetic concern. The range and versatility of the genre, moreover, offered these writers crucial opportunities for creative and editorial experimentation.

This chapter illustrates the cycle of adaptation, consumption, and production by which the medieval romance genre has sustained itself over time to remain vital in multiple national traditions: French adaptations of Tristan and Isolde and Arthurian romances, Germany’s continuing engagement with the Siegfried legend, Italian novels, such as those written by Umberto Eco and Italo Calvino, Spanish adaptations of Don Quixote and El Cid, and the long Anglo-American love affair with the medieval past. After an examination of the unique intersection of genre, story world, and media that makes medieval romance so infinitely adaptable, the chapter focuses on a series of post–World War II Anglo-American adaptations of the Arthurian legend. These texts, beginning withThe Adventures of Sir Galahad (1949) and concluding with The Green Knight (2021), each produced at a moment when either cultural context or technological innovation provided the impetus for a new Arthurian adaptation, mobilized the romance genre’s adaptive potential and deployed new media and technologies to attract the attention of audiences and critics. As they did so, they brought the narrative back into the cultural conversation, inspired other producers to seek to capitalize on King Arthur’s popularity, and ensured the continuing vitality of medieval romance.

Focusing on the so-called “romances of adventure” (romans d’aventure) which made up the largest and most popular category of romances, this chapter provides representative glimpses of how complicated, and fluid, the presentation of gender is in romance. It primarily examines romances written in French because they were the earliest to be written and served as the model for most of those we find in other western European languages, as it explores how binaries such as passive/active and male/female were complicated by deliberate strategies on the part of authors (and patrons).

This chapter discusses story collections by George Saunders, Charles Yu, Kwame Nana Adjei-Brenyah, and Mary South. These collections tell stories set in the neoliberal workplace, with a focus on emotional labor, pink-collar jobs, and the service economy. Constructing a genealogy of American writers who have written about service work, this chapter argues that contemporary short story writers have developed a unique perspective on the relationship between the short story and the market. Previous writers have either embraced writing short stories to satisfy the demands of the market, or have seen writing stories for the market as a kind of selling out. Contemporary writers of what this chapter calls “the Short Story as a Service” ask, instead, what it means to write stories in a neoliberal world that valorizes the figure of the artist and that describes service work as a kind of creative writing.

This chapter examines the origins and development of the “War Story” as a subgenre of American short fiction. It argues that the “War Story” evolved out of the Civil War and the subsequent flowering of realism, which influenced this subgenre both stylistically and philosophically. This chapter explores the major iterations of the “War Story” and documents its adaptation by writers such as Ambrose Bierce, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, and Tim O’Brien.