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With The Short Story: The Reality of Artifice, Charles E. May, a foremost authority on the genre, contributes a major effort to examine the history and characteristics of the short story from a critical perspective. Drawing on twenty-five years' experience studying the form, May argues that the development of the short story has always reflected "a tension between the traditional mythic origins of the form and the increasing pressures of modernism to depict 'real life.'" The book commences with an incisive overview, tracing how the conventions of the short story have evolved over time, from the form's origins in myth and folktale through its immersions into romanticism, realism, formalism, and, in the contemporary renaissance, the twin streams of magical realism and hyperrealism. In four core chapters May charts the major periods in the genre's development, along the way delving into the stories of a host of representative writers - among them Hawthorne, Poe, Conrad, Chekhov, Hemingway, Porter, Barthelme, and Carver - and offering close readings that entertain as they inform. An in-depth bibliographic essay surveys the principal criticism devoted to the form, while an annotated list of recommended titles furnishes readers with a useful guide to the primary English, American, and European stories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; a detailed chronology sets forth key publication and birth/death dates from the 1340s to the 1990s. A masterfully written yet eminently accessible study, The Short Story: The Reality of Artifice constitutes an important new resource for students, scholars, writers, and the reading public at large.
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