Short story

The short story is a form of short fictional narrative prose. Short stories tend to be more concise and to the point than longer works of fiction, such as novellas and novels. Because of their brevity, successful short stories rely on literary devices such as character, plot, theme, language, and insight to a greater extent than long form fiction. Famous modern English-language short stories include The Snows of Kilimanjaro by Ernest Hemingway, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce, The Dead by James Joyce, To Build A Fire by Jack London, and A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner.

History

Short stories date back to the oral story-telling traditions which produced such notable tales as Homer's the Iliad and the Odyssey. Tales such as these were told in a rhyming, poetic format, with the rhymes acting as a mnemonic tool for people to remember the story. Short sections of these tales focused on individual narratives that could be told at one sitting. The overall arch of the story would only emerge through the telling of multiple sections of the tale.

Related Topics:
Oral - Homer - Iliad - Odyssey - Rhyming - Poetic - Mnemonic

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Two ancient forms of short stories which did not exist within a larger narrative format are the fable and the anecdote. Fables, which tend to be folk tales with an explicitly expressed moral, were said by the Greek historian Herodotus to have been invented by a Greek slave named Aesop in the 6th century BCE (although other times and nationalities are also given for Aesop). These ancient fables are known today as Aesop's Fables.

Related Topics:
Narrative - Fable - Anecdote - Folk tales - Herodotus - Aesop - BCE - Aesop's Fables

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The other ancient form of short story, anecdotes, were popular during the years of the Roman Empire. Anecdotes functioned as a sort of parable, a brief realistic narration that embodies a point. Many of the surviving Roman anecdotes were later collected in the Gesta Romanorum in the 13th or 14th century. Anecdotes remained popular in Europe well into the 18th century, when the fictional anecdotal letters of Sir Roger de Coverley were published.

Related Topics:
Anecdote - Roman Empire - Parable - Gesta Romanorum

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In Europe, the oral story-telling tradition began to transition into written stories in the early 14th century, most notably with Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron. Both of these books are composed of individual short stories (which range from farce or humorous anecdotes to well-crafted literary fictions) set within a larger narrative story (a frame story), although the frame tale device was not adopted by all writers. At the end of the 16th century, some of the most popular short stories in Europe were the darkly tragic "novella" of Matteo Bandello (especially in their French translation). During the Renaissance, the term novella was used when refering to short stories.

Related Topics:
Geoffrey Chaucer - Canterbury Tales - Giovanni Boccaccio - Decameron - Frame story - Matteo Bandello

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The mid 17th century in France saw the development of a refined short novel, the "nouvelle", by such authors as Madame de Lafayette. In the 1690s, traditional Fairy tales began to be published (one of the most famous collections was by Charles Perrault). The appearance of Antoine Galland's first modern translation of the Thousand and One Nights (or "Arabian Nights") (from 1704; another translation appeared in 1710-12) would have an enormous influence on the 18th century European short stories of Voltaire, Diderot and others.

Related Topics:
Madame de Lafayette - Fairy tale - Charles Perrault - Antoine Galland - Thousand and One Nights - Voltaire - Diderot

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