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1 results

  • 14 - Modernizing the American Short Story

  • from Part II - Forms, Genre, and Media
  • Edited by Mark Whalan, University of Oregon
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of American Modernism
    Published online:
    13 July 2023
    Print publication:
    20 July 2023, pp 253-267

  • Summary

    By the beginning of the twentieth century, short-story writing in the US was well established as a form of efficient literary production along the lines that Edgar Allan Poe had established sixty years earlier. One way of understanding the American modernist short story is as an attempt to reinvent the form by restoring the balance that Poe had once advocated: not to forget technique but to make it work again in the service of art understood as both an expressive and an elite activity. This chapter considers some of the ways in which American short-story writers can usefully be said to have developed, modified, or put into question the modern principle of efficiency.