The Short Story in English by Henry Seidel Canby, 1878-1961 (PDF)

The Short Story in English

by Henry Seidel Canby, 1878-1961 (PDF)

 

Overview

From the Introduction.

I PROPOSE in the following pages to discuss the practice of the short story in English.

The vagueness of the term "short story" is apparent. No less apparent is the existence, in every literature and period, of groups of narratives which we can call by no other name. The literatures of ancient Greece, of Buddhistic India, of medieval France and Arabia—for each of them readers will bring to mind a well-marked, well-recognized genre which to-day we should put under the short story classification. The fable, the Milesian story, the birth-story of the Jatakas, the fabliau and conte—each name suggests a type of literary expression employed for very definite purposes. As writers or readers named the sonnet, the ballade, the chanson, so they named these varieties of short narrative, and felt, with more or less reason, that in each case man was endeavoring to express his idea of life in a particular and chosen fashion.

If we feel the vagueness of "short story," as used in a historical review of our narrative literature, it is not because there are no short stories which, in the age of their birth, were employed in literary work of a special nature. We would scarcely think the words vague if nothing definite were to be named by them! Nor is it because of the impossibility of marking off from long narrative the short narrative which is to be given a name. That difficulty is serious only for the rhetorician. The fault is rather in the loose meaning of the phrase, where "short" seems to qualify without defining. We cannot escape this inconvenience except by creating a new terminology, a task far less profitable than the study of a considerable and much neglected literature. Indeed, Just what has constituted the " short story " in English? is a question better answered at the end than at the beginning of such an investigation.

Nevertheless, it is evident, without further discussion, that the writers, who, in many tongues and times, have used a short narrative to convey their ideas, are, in one respect, very often alike. No matter what their subject-matter may be, morality, indecency, high imagination, or human nature, they have wished to procure a certain effect which could best be gained by a short story. They have wished to turn a moral, as in a fable, or to bring home, in a fabliau, an amusing reflection upon life, or to depict a situation, as in the typical short story of to-day, and in every case a brief narrative, with its one unified impression, best served them. It is the short narrative used for lifeunits, where only brevity and the consequent unified impression would serve, that becomes the short story. Is this definition sufficient? Only a study of a given literature will show. If it will work, as the pragmatists say, it is sufficient. But, in so working, it is neither requisite nor possible that hard and fast lines of division should result. Where to place many whitish-yellow and yellowish-white peoples is a problem for anthropologists. Yet we call the very black man negro without hesitation.

Certain limitations, however, must be imposed at the outset. Plots, circulating through every tongue, are often independent of strictly literary or cultural movements.

We, however, must concern ourselves primarily with written literature. It is the history and development of an art which we follow, an art by means of which all manner of familiar experiences can be put into form and made marketable. Plots circulate in all ways. Their history is matter for folk-lore and psychology. It is the short story as it appears in recorded English literature, and the growth of its usefulness therein, which is the subject of this volume....

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