This chapter examines US pulp crime fiction published between the 1920s and the 1960s, focusing on its formal distinctiveness and its development. It shows how the forms of organization taken by pulp labor related to the literary forms found in the stories, exploring how the principles of fungibility and economy, recognizable from the industrial factory system of mass-production, were accommodated or challenged by two key crime writers: Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. It examines how the rhythms of pulp labor intersected with the stories’ formal composition. Finally, it discusses the interpellation of a white, male, working-class readership by interwar pulp crime fiction, and the way its ideological valences were reconfigured in the postwar period by writers such as Patricia Highsmith and Chester Himes.

This chapter argues that the short story emerges and develops alongside what Henri Lefebvre has termed the “Urban Revolution.” Drawing on Ricardo Piglia’s claim that “short story always tells two stories,” whose convergence catalyses a “profane illumination,” this chapter reads the short story’s doubled form as capturing a specifically urban dialectic, which expresses the interplay between the determining force of capitalist urbanization, and the hidden histories, everydayness, and revolutionary potentials lurking within. To make this claim, the chapter periodizes the history of the American short story and maps its changing generic forms in relationship to four key moments of urbanization: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s romance in the colonial mercantile city; Edgar Allan Poe’s and Pauline Hopkins’ detective fiction and Anzia Yezierska’s and Meridel LeSeur’s ghetto pastoral in the industrial city; Ray Bradbury’s and Samuel Delany’s Science Fiction in the automotive city; and Eden Robinson’s SF refiguration in the logistical or neo-mercantile city.

This chapter discusses ways in which the Arthurian legend was transformed between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries by French and English romance writers, focusing on the introduction of new characters, changes to the roles of traditionally central characters, and conflicting loyalties and values. Arthur is often displaced from the central role in the plot and can seem passive and ineffective. Gawain is the Top Knight in the English tradition, but Lancelot (a French addition) becomes increasingly important, not least because of his long affair with the queen, which is a contributing factor to the final collapse of Camelot. Family matters increasingly lead to conflicts of loyalties: Morgan le Fay is hostile to her brother, Arthur, and his Orkney nephews grow in number, some loyal but some treacherous. Mordred is not only Arthur’s nephew but sometimes also his son by incest, destined to kill his father. The Grail quest features first Perceval and then Galahad (Lancelot’s illegitimate son); its spiritual values challenge the ethos of secular chivalry and ennobling love. Does this quest bring glory to Arthur’s Round Table, or is it a critique of a fatally flawed society? Important variations in medieval approaches to the legend appear through this period.

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 characterizes 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.

This chapter tracks the figure of the rat across American short fiction, focusing in particular on H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Rats in the Walls” (1924), Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Mazes” (1975), and Karen Joy Fowler’s “Us” (2013). These stories illustrate powerful narrative effects that can be produced by constructing particular forms of animality, while also blurring, at times, the boundaries between what it means to be a human and what it means to be an animal. The chapter engages with the academic fields of human–animal studies, multispecies studies, and animality studies, exploring the short stories not only in relation to animal advocacy, but also problematic histories of animalizing certain human groups. Posthumanism cuts across these various fields, questioning constructions of the human as fundamentally different and superior to all other species on the planet. The chapter ultimately argues that some narrative techniques have more posthumanist potential than others.

This chapter explores the origins of the US science fiction short story in transnational print networks featuring Mary Shelley, H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, and Edgar Allan Poe. Throughout, we highlight the significance of women writers such as Lydia Maria Child, Judith Merril, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Octavia E. Butler. The chapter examines how struggles over science and technology shape popular turn-of-the-century stories of young white man inventors and the mostly white man-focused twentieth-century pulp magazine Amazing Stories and Astounding Stories. We connect W. E. B. Du Bois’s “The Comet” to a long genealogy of US science fiction written by Black people, including earlier writers such as Martin Delany as well as later ones such as Samuel Delany. The conclusion considers anthologies and projects such as solarpunk that revitalize the genre by imagining the social effects of changes in science and nature in relation to new forms of technology, collaboration, and social movement activism.

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.