The present volume is a highly comprehensive assessment of the postcolonial short story since the thirty-six contributions cover most geographical areas concerned. Another important feature is that it deals not only with exclusive practitioners of the genre (Mansfield, Munro), but also with well-known novelists (Achebe, Armah, Atwood, Carey, Rushdie), so that stimulating comparisons are suggested between shorter and longer works by the same authors. In addition, the volume is of interest for the study of aspects of orality (dialect, dance rhythms, circularity and trickster figure for instance) and of the more or less conflictual relationships between the individual (character or implied author) and the community.Furthermore, the marginalized status of women emerges as another major theme, both as regards the past for white women settlers, or the present for urbanized characters, primarily in Africa and India. The reader will also have the rare pleasure of discovering Janice Kulik Keefer's “Fox,” her version of what she calls in her commentary “displaced autobiography’” or “creative non-fiction.” Lastly, an extensive bibliography on the postcolonial short story opens up further possibilities for research.
JACQUELINE BARDOLPH (d. 1999) was Professor of English at the University of Nice, and wrote extensively on the postcolonial novel and short fiction, with a focus on African literature. Her study of Ngugi wa Thiong'o: l'homme et l'oeuvre appeared in 1981; the editor of several volumes of critical essays on aspects of postcolonial anglophone literatures, she also organized conferences on the postcolonial short story which provided an influential international focus on this genre.
André VIOLA: IntroductionCanadaMarta DVORAK: Ernest Buckler. Canada’s “Another-Time-and-Space-Builder”Janice KULYK KEEFER: Limitations and Possibilities. On the Writing of Autobiographical Short FictionsJanice KULYK-KEEFER: FoxFrançoise COUTURIER-STOREY: Subversive Corporeal Discourse in Margaret Atwood’s “The Female Body”Danielle SCHAUB: A Measure of Irony. Derision in Mavis Gallant’s From the Fifteenth DistrictMary CONDÉ: Voyage Towards an Ending. Alice Munro’s “Goodness and Mercy”Teresa GIBERT: Narrative Strategies in Thomas King’s Short StoriesRowland SMITH: “Rewriting the Frontier”. Wilderness and Social Code in the Fiction of Alice MunroSimone VAUTHIER: The Mirror and the Window. Jane Urquhart’s “Forbidden Dances”The West IndiesLouis JAMES: Writing the Ballad. The Short Fiction of Samuel Selvon and Earl LovelaceFrançoise CHARRAS: “Neither Fish Nor Fowl”. Paule Marshall’s Early Short Stories from a Caribbean PerspectiveClaude MAISONNAT: The Poetics of Death. “Tears of the Sea” by Olive SeniorFrances WILLIAMS: Colonial Literature or Caribbean Orature? Creole Chips by Edgar MittelholzerThorunn LONSDALE: Literary Foremother. Jean Rhys’s “Sleep It Off Lady” and Two Jamaican PoemsSouthern AfricaZoë WICOMB: South African Short Fiction and OralitySheila ROBERTS: “In the Cage of Consciousness”Margaret J. DAYMOND: “Nowhere Yet Everywhere”Johan U. JACOBS: Finding a Safe House of Fiction. Nadine Gordimer’s Jump and Other StoriesTim O. McLOUGHLIN: Women’s Short Fiction in Zimbabwe. Changing Times and FocusClara TSABEDZE: Resuscitating the Tale in Black South African Writing. The Art of Narrative in Njabulo Ndebele’s FoolsWest AfricaDerek WRIGHT: Developing Agency. The Later Stories of Ayi Kwei ArmahAlain SÉVERAC: Achebe’s Short Stories. Their Intertextual Relationship to His NovelsJane WILKINSON: “Second-New”. Serialization and Circulation in Basi and Company by Ken Saro-WiwaChristine MBONYINGINGO: Unanswered Questions, Unattended Quests. Ama Ata Aidoo’s Short StoriesChristine FIOUPOU: Poetry as a “metaphorical guillotine” in the Works of Nisi OsundareIndia, Sri Lanka and the DiasporaPadmini MONGIA: Confession and Self-Making in the Fiction of Contemporary Indian Women WritersMartina GHOSH-SCHELLHORN: Transitional Identities. Indian Women’s Short StoriesCynthia CAREY-ABRIOUX: ‘Coming Unstuck’. Salman Rushdie’s Short Story “The Courter”Rocío G. DAVIS: Negotiating Place/Re-Creating Home. Short-Story Cycles by Naipaul, Mistry, and VassanjiPaula BURNETT: The Captives and the Lion’s Claw. Reading Romesh Gunesekera’s Monkfish MoonNew ZealandRenata CASERTANO: Falling Away From the Centre. Centrifugal and Centripetal Dynamics in Janet Frame’s Short FictionMark WILLIAMS: “The Artificial and the Naturel”. The Development of Katherine Mansfield’s Prose StyleLydia WEVERS: Talking about GenXAustraliaXavier PONS: Weird Tales. Peter Carey’s Short StoriesWilliam H. NEW: Henry Lawson’s “Hungerford”Peter O. STUMMER: The Uneasy Gaze of Secondary Hegemony. The Construction of Africa and New Guinea in Shaw and ShearstonDieter RIEMENSCHNEIDER: The Triangle of Art and Life. Michael Wilding, Story WriterWorks CitedChristiane KEANE: The Postcolonial Short Story. A Bibliography of AnthologiesNotes on Contributors