The Cambridge Introduction to the American Short Story

Martin Scofield is Senior Lecturer in English and American Literature at the University of Kent.

• 1. Introduction; 2. The short story as ironic myth: Washington Irving and William Austin; 3. Nathaniel Hawthorne; 4. Edgar Allan Poe; 5. Herman Melville; 6. New territories: Bret Harte and Mark Twain; 7. Realism, the grotesque and impressionism: Hamlin Garland, Ambrose Bierce and Stephen Crane; 8. Henry James; 9. Rebecca Harding Davis, Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman; 10. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kate Chopin, Willa Cather and Edith Wharton; 11. Growth, fragmentation, new aesthetics and new voices in the early twentieth century; 12. O. Henry and Jack London; 13. Sherwood Anderson; 14. Ernest Hemingway; 15. F. Scott Fitzgerald; 16. William Faulkner; 17. Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor; 18. Charles Chesnutt, Richard Wright, James Baldwin and the African American short story to 1965; 19. Aspects of the American short story 1930–80; 20. Two traditions and the changing idea of the mainstream; 22. The postmodern short story in America; 22. Raymond Carver; 23. Epilogue: the contemporary American short story; Guide to further reading.

'… a pleasant and informative read …' Revue Française d'Etudes Américaine