Part I: Introduction, survey, and theory Michael Basseler, Ansgar Nünning: 1. Introduction: Features, objectives, and premises of "A history of the American short story" Part II: Early roots and formal beginning: From tale to short story Oliver Scheiding, Martin Seidl: 4. Early American short narratives: The art of story-telling prior to Washington Irving Part III: From realism to modernism (1890s-1940s) Gabrielle Rippl: 10. Feminist voices around 1900: Kate Chopin's "Désirée's baby" and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The yellow wall-paper" Part IV: From modernism to postmodernism (1940s-1970s) Martin Lüthe: 16. Classics of the African American short story: Richard Wright's "The man who lived underground" and James Baldwin's "Going to meet the man" Part V: Beyond postmodernism: Contemporary developments Julia Breitbach: 22. Minimalism and the return to realism in the 1970s and 1980s: Raymond Carver's "Why don't you dance?" and "Cathedral" Michael Basseler: 2. A brief survey of this "History of the American short story" Michael Basseler: 3. Theories and typologies of the short story Werner Reinhart: 5. Stories of the puritan legacy: Myth and allegory in Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" and "Rappaccinni's daughter" Erik Redling: 6. Tales of detection and deterioration: Edgar Allan Poe's "The murders in the rue morgue" and "The fall of the house of Usher" Ingo Berensmeyer, Martin Spies: 7. Between romance and realism: 'Twice-told' urban gothic in Herman Melville's "Bartleby, the scrivener" and the related mid-19th-century narratives of modern city life Holger Kersten: 8. The rise of local-color writing in the American west: Bret Harte's "The outcasts of Poker Flat" and Mark Twain's "The celebrated jumping frog of Calaveras County" Robert Vogt: 9. Anti-war stories, horror stories, and tall tales: Ambrose Bierce's "An occurrence at Owl Creek bridge" and "Oil of dog" Simon Cooke: 11. The beginnings of the modernist short story of consciousness: Henry James's "The beast in the jungle" Michael Basseler, Ansgar Nünning: 12. Anti-plot stories and stories of initiation: Sherwood Anderson's "Mother" and "I want to know why" Oliver Scheiding: 13. Naturalistic short stories: Stephen Crane's "The open boat" and John Steinbeck's "The chrysanthemums" Kurt Müller: 14. Short stories of the 1920s and 1930s between tradition and innovation: F. Scott Fitzgerald's "May day" and Ernest Hemingway's "The short happy life of Francis Macomber Thomas Claviez: 15. Modernist short stories between the regional and the universal: William Faulkner's "Dry september" and Eudora Welty's "Petrified man" Susanne Rohr: 17. New directions in the post-war American short story: J. D. Salinger's Gladwaller-trilogy and Bernard Malamud's "The mourners" Eva-Sabine Zehelein: 18. Middle-class life in the (realist) short story: John Cheever's "The enormous radio" and John Updike's "The music school" Ina Bergmann: 19. Stories of female initiation: Flannery O'Connor's "Good country people" and Joyce Carol Oates's "How I contemplated the world from the Detroit House of Correction and began my life over again" René Dietrich, Mirjam Horn: 20. Experimental short fictions of the 1960s: Thomas Pynchon's "Entropy" and Robert Coover's "The babysitter" Jochen Achilles: 21. Postmodernist metafiction: John Barth's "Lost in the funhouse" and Donald Barthelme's "The glass mountain" and "The balloon" Wolfgang Hochbruck: 23. Overcoming borders in native American and Canadian first nations short stories: Simon Ortiz' "Howbah Indians" and Thomas King's "Borders" Antje Kley: 24. New directions in the American short story of the 1990s: (Multi-)Ethnic identity in Sandra Cisnero's "Never marry a Mexican" and Bharati Mukherjee's "The middleman" Astrid Böger: 25. New directions in the American short story after 9/11: Don DeLillo's "Baader-Meinhof" and Nicole Krauss's "Future emergencies" |
