The Canadian Short Story: Status, Criticism, Historical Survey

Summary

I incline to find more and more that the short story is one of the trickiest forms.

—Dorothy Livesay

In its main line of development, the English-Canadian short story is a relatively recent literary phenomenon, spanning a little more than 100 years by now. It began to coalesce as a national genre in the 1890s, some seventy years after the beginnings of the American short story around 1820. Canadian short stories of the late nineteenth century — by writers like Isabella Valancy Crawford, Susan Frances Harrison, Ernest Thompson Seton, or even Charles G. D. Roberts — could not match the significance and excellence of American short-story writers of the American Renaissance such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, or Herman Melville. It was only in the twentieth century, with Morley Callaghan's development of the modernist Canadian short story in the 1920s, that the genre came into its own in Canada and joined the realm of world literature. The crucial ascendancy of the Canadian short story, however, began in the 1960s, raising the quality, diversity, and prominence of the genre in Canada to new levels.

The short story is today generally considered to be a particularly vital genre, if not the flagship genre of Canadian literature. Its continuing success is reflected first of all in the fact that major Canadian writers have almost without exception devoted considerable effort to the form, and have succeeded in producing internationally renowned collections of short stories. Second, several Canadian short-story writers indubitably rank among the world's best — and best-known — contemporary writers of short fiction, such as Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood. These authors have been awarded major international literary prizes for their works, for instance the Booker Prize (Atwood) or the W. H. Smith Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award (Munro). Almost as a matter of course by now, several Canadian writers frequently first publish their short stories in The New Yorker, the foremost international forum for the genre. Even apart from such international achievements, the contemporary Canadian short story is a lively and productive genre. Thus the annual Governor General's Award (here: for Fiction), Canada's most important literary prize, has for almost thirty years been granted one out of three times to Canadian short-story collections rather than to novels. Then too, the number of anthologies of Canadian short stories published in Canada is remarkably high.