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  • Chapter 15 - Short Fiction

  • from Part III - Aesthetics
  • Edited by James Purdon, University of St Andrews, Scotland
  • Book:
    British Literature in Transition, 1900–1920: A New Age?
    Published online:
    07 December 2021
    Print publication:
    02 December 2021, pp 279-294

  • Summary

    This chapter argues that the spatialising habits of the short fiction of the period can best be understood in terms not only of a modernist preoccupation with the complex and ambiguous layering of urban milieu, but of its polar opposite: the threat (or promise) of movement, of inter-relation, which unsettles the remote traditional communities portrayed in local colour writing. James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’, Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Bliss’ and ‘The Stranger’, and ‘A Conjugal Episode’, a late story by one of the most successful New Woman novelists, George Egerton (Mary Chavelita Dunne), will be taken to exemplify the first of these tendencies. The second can be shown to include stories about Englishness and empire, by Rudyard Kipling and D. H. Lawrence; stories about migration, by Joseph Conrad and George Moore; and stories about ghosts, by M. R. James and May Sinclair. In either case, short fiction tended to be at its best, and most characteristic, when least forgiving.