Reading the Short Story

Anna Wing-bo Tso is an associate professor who has over ten years of English teaching experience at various universities in Hong Kong, where she directs the Research Institute for Digital Culture and Humanities and heads the Master of Arts in Applied English Linguistics. She has published widely on literacies, children’s literature, and language education in refereed books and peer-reviewed journals across Asia, Europe, the U.K., the U.S., Canada and Australia. Scarlett Lee is an English teacher and Cambridge English examiner in Rome. She works as a freelance literary critic.

• Table of ContentsAcknowledgments (Anna Wing-bo Tso)Foreword (Andrew Parkin)PrefacePartShort Stories: Genre and Literary Criticism1. A Brief History of the Short Story as a Literary Genre2. Practical Literary CriticismPartClose Reading for Short Stories3. Religion and Redemption in ­O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”4. Consumerism, Alienation and Digital Dystopia in Bradbury’s “The Veldt”5. Masculinity and Sexuality in Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain”6. Fantasy and Fan Fiction in Gaiman’s “The Problem of Susan”PartLiterary and Comparative Analyses of Short Stories7. Psychoanalysis and the Gothic in Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” and Stevenson’s “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”8. Irony and Paralysis in Joyce’s “Grace” and Trevor’s “Of the Cloth”9. Civil Rights and Prejudice in Walker’s “Everyday Use” and Smith’s “The Embassy of Cambodia”10. Femininity and Social Pressures in Lessing’s “To Room Nineteen” and Gilman’s “The Yellow ­Wall-Paper”AfterwordIndex