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.

The short story remains at heart of southern literature. Anthologies, surveys, and criticism all tout the centrality of the form to the representation of the region. But the short story form does not merely facilitate a focus on diverse, local southern cultures. Because short stories can be easily republished and collected, these “little postage stamps” also allow such diverse, local cultures to circulate broadly. In examining the ways short fictional forms enable access to and communication with far-flung places, this chapter offers case studies of three accomplished short story writers: Kate Chopin, Zora Neale Hurston, and Oscar Cásares. Theirs is a literature of the provinces that is far from provincial – a regional literature par excellence that remains very much engaged with the broader world.

This chapter explores the magazine culture of late colonial and early national America in order to recover the crucial role played by the short story in the periodical’s overburdened ambition to bring “cultural capital” across the Atlantic. Looking at these magazines we find the short story in unlikely places and forms – embedded within other fictions or non-fiction narratives, serialized in relationship to prized illustrations, or disguised as the “serial essay.” But while the print economy of the magazine would change dramatically by the 1840s and 1850s, resulting in the rise of the more familiar and recognizable periodical short story, the magazine short story has been there virtually from the beginning.

This chapter chronicles the development of the short story as a product of the Program Era from its inception in the 1930s up through the contemporary moment, and argues that its history can be understood in terms of the experiences of the college-educated creative class, whose socioeconomic situation is perennially precarious. As shown through illustrations from the Best American Short Stories, two institutions loom large in this history: the New Yorker and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, which can stand in for the NYC vs. MFA dialectic that shapes the careers of most American short story writers. It is between these poles that the short story has been negotiated and evaluated during the Program Era. For most writers, it is an apprenticeship form, originally addressed to teachers and students and then to other writers and literary professionals, preparing the field for the novel addressed to the larger reading public.

This chapter explores short American fictions that are like jokes, drawing on Sigmund Freud’s contrast between the “tendentious” joke, which generates “pleasure by lifting suppressions and repressions,” and “innocent” humor, its pleasure based on “the liberation of nonsense.” In opposition to ideas of the classical American short story as a compact vehicle of epiphany, it argues for a countertradition of short fiction of “innocent” comedy, which features the linguistic slapstick generated by language learning and exposes the instability of language. It frames the immigrant Leo Rosten as an inheritor of Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, and O. Henry, all of whom draw on lexicography and language learning to explore the “innocent” humor of unstable language. Like Boris Eikhenbaum in his description of O. Henry, Rosten’s best-known protagonist, the English-language student Hyman Kaplan, asserts that Russian Jews such as himself are especially attuned to the comic potential of English.

This chapter argues that emotions are a way of practicing community, that feeling rules delineate the boundaries of what is acceptable and who can be part of the communities imagined within medieval romance. Attentiveness to the diction of emotions offers a new and potentially rich avenue of inquiry into how courtly readers imagined connection. Emotion words function like a contract between people: they negotiate, enact, and destroy relationships. And in romance, these utterances most frequently misfire, sowing confusion, misunderstanding, and, most of all, despair among the lovers and knights who are propelled to repair the damage of these misperformances to their relationships. Emotional misfirings – the moments where love fails, or where shame, anger, and grief take over – are the very building blocks through which romance negotiates and narrates elite communities.

In or around 1923, we thought we knew what the short story was. Or, rather, Edward J. O’Brien did, and as editor of the influential Best American Short Stories anthology since 1915 his words carried considerable weight in the newly professionalizing field of literary publishing. Taking stock of a genre that had evolved along with the expanding print culture of the nineteenth century, O’Brien was concerned that even as luminous examples of its literary artistry had found fertile ground in America, the modern, industrial conditions that birthed the form had left an indelible mark upon it that impeded its development and marred it in the eyes of readers. For O’Brien, a true “short story” was a rare and precious beast, to be nurtured and distinguished from a mass of American short fiction that was disqualified wholly from the sanctified realm of “art,” either because of its unruly form or because of its deployment of hackneyed tropes directed solely to the demands of the marketplace. His definition enacted a tendency present in short story criticism since Edgar Allan Poe first started to describe an emergent commercial style, upon which he relied to pay the bills, which was to characterize the form negatively, by what it was not: the novel, poetry, the folk tale, and so on. So much “fiction that is merely short” was an abomination for O’Brien; it was especially prone, relative to other genres, to the charge of committing nothing less than literary “heresy.” In The Advance of the American Short Story (1923; revised 1931), O’Brien wrote that “almost every American short story is the product of one or more of four heresies, the heresy of types, the heresy of local color, the heresy of ‘plot,’ and the heresy of the surprise ending” (1931, 6).

This chapter considers the popularity of the genre of the short story in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It explores, in particular, a class of magazine stories for which the terms of approval followed the lines of reading for amusement and entertainment. Surveying critical accounts of the short story, and the burgeoning interest in anthologies and handbooks for aspiring writers, the chapter considers what follows if we not only accept but accentuate the notion of the genre as an artistic commodity in a gendered marketplace defined by overabundance. Special consideration is given to the subgenre of “storiettes” published alongside a column covering “the latest fads” in Munsey’s magazine. The essay argues that the style of the period’s short story developed in tandem with ideas about it as a fashionable and consumable commodity, and even as something of a fad.