Modern American Short Story Sequences: Composite Fictions and Fictive Communities

This book gathers together eleven full-length essays on important American short story sequences of the twentieth century. The introduction by J. Gerald Kennedy elucidates problems of defining the genre, cites notable instances of the form (such as Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio), and explores the implications of its modern emergence and popularity. Subsequent essays discuss illustrative works by such figures as Henry James, Jean Toomer, Ernest Hemingway, Richard Wright, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, J. D. Salinger, John Cheever, John Updike, Louise Erdrich, and Raymond Carver. While examining distinctive thematic concerns, each essay also consider implications of form and arrangement in the construction of composite fictions that often produce the illusion of a fictive community.

• Full-length essays by major scholar-critics on eleven important American short story sequences • A ground-breaking discussion of the form and nature of a popular but little-understood genre • Interpretations of individual works that will be both provocative and revealing to students and to academic readers

Introduction J. Gerald Kennedy; 1. Henry James’s Incipient Poetics of the Short Story Sequence: The Finer Grain (1910) Richard A. Hocks; 2. Toomer’s Cane as narrative sequence Linda Wagner-Martin; 3. Hemingway’s In Our Time: the biography of a book Michael Reynolds; 4. Wright writing reading: narrative strategies in Uncle Tom’s Children John Lowe; 5. The African-American voice in Faulkner’s Go Down Moses John Carlos Rowe; 6. Meditations on nonpresence: re-visioning the short story in Eudora Welty’s The Wide Net Susan V. Donaldson; 7. Nine Stories: J. D. Salinger’s linked mysteries Ruth Prigozy; 8. Cheever’s Shady Hill: a suburban sequence Scott Donaldson; 9. John Updike’s Olinger Stories: new light among the shadows Robert M. Luscher; 10. Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine: narrative communities and the short story sequence Hertha D. Wong; 11. From Anderson’s Winesburg to Carver’s Cathedral: the short story sequence and the semblance of community J. Gerald Kennedy.