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Print Price: $134.99

Format:
Paperback
520 pp.
3 photos, 6" x 9"

ISBN-13:
9780195429930

Copyright Year:
2010

Imprint: OUP Canada

Short Fiction & Critical Contexts

A Compact Reader

Eric Henderson and Geoff Hancock

"Henderson and Geoff Hancock have edited a fine and useful book that presents the short story in an exemplary fashion." -- David Malcolm, The Times Literary Supplement (13 Aug 2010)

Short Fiction & Critical Contexts: A Compact Reader is a challenging, versatile, and engaging resource for the study of short fiction. This collection features a diverse group of writers from differing ethnic, cultural, and national backgrounds and highlights female and Canadian authors. Each story is introduced by a brief biography of the author, information on his or her approach to writing fiction, and information about the story itself. The second half of the text collects a variety of documents written on the topic of the short story, many by the authors featured in the first half of the text. The combination of stories and their context makes this an invaluable reader for students studying the short story at any level.

Readership : Short Fiction and Critical Contexts: A Compact Reader is a core text for Short Story and Short Fiction courses taught in second or third year, offered out of college and university English departments. It is also suitable as one of several anthologies assigned in first-year Introduction to Literature courses.

Reviews

"Eric Henderson and Geoff Hancock have edited a fine and useful book that presents the short story in an exemplary fashion. This is a good book and an excellent introduction to short fiction from a variety of readers. Its choice of short stories is at times usefully quirky and its setting out of issues connected with short fiction is enlightening."

--David Malcolm, The Times Literary Supplement (13 August 2010)

Preface
Introduction
Short Stories
1. Edgar Allan Poe: 'The Masque of the Red Death'
2. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: 'The Yellow Wallpaper'
3. Stephen Crane: 'A Mystery of Heroism'
4. Edith Wharton: 'A Journey'
5. E. Pauline Johnson: 'The Derelict'
6. James Joyce: 'A Painful Case'
7. Franz Kafka: 'Report to an Academy'
8. J.G. Sime: 'An Irregular Union'
9. D.H. Lawrence: 'Tickets Please'
10. Katherine Mansfield: 'The Stranger'
11. Morley Callaghan: 'A Predicament'
12. Ernest Hemingway: 'The Capital of the World'
13. Marcel Aymé: 'The Walker through walls'
14. Heinrich Böll: 'My Sad Face'
15. Sinclair Ross: 'The Runaway'
16. Ethel Wilson: 'The Window'
17. Margaret Laurence: 'The Loons'
18. Italo Calvino: 'The Origin of the Birds'
19. Clark Blaise: 'Eyes'
20. Angela Carter: 'The Company of Wolves'
21. Mavis Gallant: 'Between Zero and One'
22. Elizabeth Spencer: 'The Girl Who Loved Horses'
23. Margaret Atwood: 'Happy Endings'
24. Jorge Luis Borges: 'Shakespeare's Memory'
25. Jose Dalisay, Jr: 'Heartland'
26. Amy Hempel: 'Nashville Gone to Ashes'
27. Bharati Mukherjee: 'The Lady from Lucknow'
28. Raymond Carver: 'Errand'
29. Alice Munro: 'Pictures of the Ice'
30. D. Schoemperlen: 'Antonyms of Fiction'
31. Michael Dougan: 'Black Cherry'
32. Shani Mootoo: 'Out on Main Street'
33. Edwidge Danticat: 'Children of the Sea'
34. Greg Hollingshead: 'The People of the Sudan'
35. Barbara Gowdy: 'We So Seldom Look on Love'
36. Haruki Murakami: 'The Seventh Man'
37. Timothy Taylor: 'Smoke's Fortune'
38. Richard Van Camp: 'Sky Burial'
39. Thomas King: 'A Short History of Indians in Canada'
40. Shyam Selvadurai: 'The Demoness Kali'
Documents & Dialogues
1. Prologue: The Need for Narrative
Robert Fulford: a) 'The Need for Narrative'
Thomas Gullason: b) 'The Qualities of an Outstanding Story'
Italo Calvino: c) 'Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Classic'
2. The Art of the Short Story
Edgar Allan Poe: a) 'The Single Effect'
Henry James: b) 'Rendering Reality'
Brander Matthews: c) 'Codifying the Short Story'
Joseph Conrad: d) 'Fiction's Appeal'
Virginia Woolf: e) 'Rendering Experience'
Elizabeth Bowen: f) 'The Morality of the Short Story'
Julio Cortazar: g) 'Exploring "Storyness" through Metaphor'
3. Genre and the Short Story
a) The Novel and the Short Story
Edith Wharton: i) 'Situation Is the Main Concern of the Short Story, Character of the Novel'
Steven Millhauser: ii) 'The Short Story Concentrates on its Grain of Sand...'
Greg Hollingshead: iii) 'A Point of Perfect, Drunken Poise...'
b) The Lyric and the Short Story
Eileen Baldeshwiler: i) 'The Lyric Short Story: The Sketch of a History'
c) History and the Short Story
M. Scofield: i) 'Story and History in Raymond Carver'
4. Epiphany and the Short Story
James Joyce: a) 'The Joycean Epiphany'
Philip Stevik: b) 'Against Epiphany'
Thomas M. Leitch: c) 'Moving Toward Dissillusionment'
Cynthia J. Hallett: d) 'Significant Omissions'
5. Reality, Fantasy, and the Short Story
Flannery O'Connor: a) 'The Grotesque'
Tzvetan Todorov: b) 'The Fantastic'
Angela Carter: c) 'The "Tale"'
Geoff Hancock: d) 'Magic Realism'
Linda Hutcheon: e) 'Fantasy, Reality, and Metafiction'
6. The Short Story and its Practitioners
C.P. Gilman: a) 'Why I Wrote "The Yellow Wallpaper"'
Chekov: b) From Letters 1888-99
S. Crane: c) 'Humanity Was a Much More Interesting Study'
T. King: d) 'Native Fiction'
S. Selvadurai: e) 'Literature of the South Asian Diaspora'
f) Dialogues
i) A. Munro
ii) B. Mukherjee
iii) S. Mootoo
7. Epilogue
V. Nabokov: 'How to Read Well'
A. Manguel: 'In Praise of Reading'
M. Atwood: 'The Need for a Reader'
Source Notes & Acknowledgements

Instructor's manual (online)

Eric Henderson is a Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Victoria, and has taught previously at Simon Fraser University and Okanagan University College. He has published two other successful books with OUP Canada: The Active Reader (2008) and Writing by Choice (2006). Geoff Hancock is an author and editor long active in the field of Canadian literature who is responsible for numerous collections and anthologies.

Elements of Literature - Edited by Robert Scholes, Nancy R. Comley, Carl H. Klaus and David Staines
Making Sense - Margot Northey and Joan McKibbin
Practical Grammar - Maxine Ruvinsky

Special Features

Comprehensive. While compact in size, the reader boasts a broad selection of classical and contemporary works.
Diverse selection. Provides students with stories and writings on the short story by both Canadian and International authors. Featuring some of Canada's most well known authors including Mavis Gallant and Margaret Atwood, the text includes works by canonical and non-canonical writers from a variety of ethnic and cultural backgrounds.
Contextual approach. Combining short stories and writing on the short story, Short Fiction and Critical Contexts provides students with examples of a variety of fiction and a context for broader understanding.
Accessible glossary. A detailed glossary of short fiction terms helps students understand the selections by putting definitions at their fingertips.
'Dialogues and Documents' non-fiction excerpts present current 'state of the art' in critical study of the short story and provide students with specific tools and techniques to enrich comprehension