A Companion to
the American Short Story
Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture
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69. A Companion to the American Short Story
Edited by Alfred Bendixen and James Nagel
A C O M P A N I O N T O
T HE A MERICAN
S HORT S TORY
E D I T E D B Y
A L F R E D B E N D I X E N A N D J A M E S N A G E L
A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication
This edition fi rst published 2010
© 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd except for editorial material and organization
© 2010 Alfred Bendixen and James Nagel
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A companion to the American short story / edited by Alfred Bendixen and James Nagel.
p. cm. – (Blackwell companions to literature and culture)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4051-1543-8 (alk. paper)
1. Short stories, American–History and criticism. I. Bendixen, Alfred. II. Nagel, James.
PS374.S5C58
2010
813′.0103–dc22
2009035861
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Set in 11 on 13 pt Garamond 3 by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited
Printed in Singapore
1 2010
Contents
Notes on Contributors viii
Acknowledgments xiv
Part I: The Nineteenth Century
1
1 The Emergence and Development of the American Short Story
3
Alfred Bendixen
2 Poe and the American Short Story
20
Benjamin F. Fisher
3 A Guide to Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener”
35
Steven T. Ryan
4 Towards History and Beyond: Hawthorne and the American
Short Story
50
Alfred Bendixen
5 Charles W. Chesnutt and the Fictions of a “New” America
68
Charles Duncan
6 Mark Twain and the American Comic Short Story
78
David E. E. Sloane
7 New England Local-Color Literature: A Colonial Formation
91
Josephine Donovan
8 Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Feminist Tradition of
the American Short Story
105
Martha J. Cutter
9 The Short Stories of Edith Wharton
118
Donna Campbell
vi
Contents
Part II: The Transition into the New Century 133
10 The Short Stories of Stephen Crane
135
&
nbsp; Paul Sorrentino
11 Kate
Chopin
152
Charlotte Rich
12 Frank Norris and Jack London
171
Jeanne Campbell Reesman
13 From “Water Drops” to General Strikes: Nineteenth- and
Early Twentieth-Century Short Fiction and Social Change
187
Andrew J. Furer
Part III: The Twentieth Century 215
14 The Twentieth Century: A Period of Innovation and Continuity
217
James Nagel
15 The
Hemingway
Story
224
George Monteiro
16 William Faulkner’s Short Stories
244
Hugh Ruppersburg
17 Katherine
Anne
Porter
256
Ruth M. Alvarez
18 Eudora Welty and the Short Story: Theory and Practice
277
Ruth D. Weston
19 The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Structure, Narrative
Technique, Style
295
Kirk Curnutt
20 “The Look of the World”: Richard Wright on Perspective
316
Mikko Tuhkanen
21 Small Planets: The Short Fiction of Saul Bellow
328
Gloria L. Cronin
22 John
Updike
345
Robert M. Luscher
23 Raymond Carver in the Twenty-First Century
366
Sandra Lee Kleppe
24 Multi-Ethnic Female Identity and Denise Chávez’s The Last of
the Menu Girls 380
Karen Weekes
Contents
vii
Part IV: Expansive Considerations 389
25 Landscape as Haven in American Women’s Short Stories
391
Leah B. Glasser
26 The American Ghost Story
408
Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock
27 The
Detective
Story
425
Catherine Ross Nickerson
28 The Asian American Short Story
436
Wenying Xu
29 The Jewish American Story
450
Andrew Furman
30 The Multiethnic American Short Story
466
Molly Crumpton Winter
31 “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” American Restlessness and
the Short-Story Cycle
482
Jeff Birkenstein
Index 502
Notes on Contributors
Ruth M. Alvarez is the Curator of Literary Manuscripts at the University of Maryland
Libraries. She has responsibility for the Papers of Katherine Anne Porter as well as
nearly twenty related collections of primary materials that support the study of
Katherine Anne Porter. With Thomas F. Walsh, she edited Uncollected Early Prose of
Katherine Anne Porter and, with Kathryn Hilt, Katherine Anne Porter: An Annotated
Bibliography . For Mexico ’ s Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, she edited
Un pa í s familiar: Escritos sobre M é xico [ “ My Familiar Country ” : Katherine Anne Porter ’ s
Writings on Mexico].
Alfred Bendixen is Professor of English at Texas A & M University. He is the founder
of the American Literature Association, which he currently serves as Executive Direc-
tor. His books include Haunted Women (1985), an edition of the composite novel The
Whole Family (1986), “ The Amber Gods ” and Other Stories by Harriet Prescott Spofford,
(1989), and Edith Wharton: New Critical Essays (1992). He is the associate editor of
the Continuum Encyclopedia of American Literature (1999), the co - editor of the recently
published Cambridge Companion to American Travel Writing (2009), and the editor of
the forthcoming Blackwell Companion to the American Novel .
Jeff Birkenstein has strong interests in the short story and the story sequence as well
as in food and cultural criticism. His co - edited collection of essays entitled Reframing
9/11: Film, Popular Culture and the “ War on Terror ” (with Anna Froula of East Carolina
University and Karen Randell of Southampton Solent University) is due out in the
Spring of 2010. He is working currently on Cultural Representation in the International
Short Story Sequence , co - edited with Robert M. Luscher. He is an Associate Professor
of English at Saint Martin ’ s University.
Donna Campbell is Associate Professor of English at Washington State University.
She is the author of Resisting Regionalism: Gender and Naturalism in American Fiction,
1885 – 1915 (1997), and her work has appeared in Legacy , Studies in American Fiction ,
American Literary Realism , and Studies in American Naturalism , among other journals.
Notes on Contributors
ix
Recent publications include essays on Kate Chopin ’ s At Fault in The Cambridge Com-
panion to Kate Chopin and on Naturalism in the forthcoming Cambridge History of the
American Novel. Her work on Edith Wharton includes a critical introduction to Edith
Wharton ’ s The Fruit of the Tree (2000) and essays in the Edith Wharton Review , Jack
London: One Hundred Years a Writer , and Twisted from the Ordinary: Essays on American
Literary Naturalism . Her current project is a book on American women writers of
Naturalism.
Gloria L. Cronin is College of Humanities Professor and Professor of English at
Brigham Young University. She is the editor of the The Saul Bellow Journal , an executive
coordinator of the American Literature Association, recipient of the Pozner Bibliogra-
phy Prize awarded by the Jewish Library Association, director of the Jewish American
and Holocaust Literature Annual Symposium, and board member of the African Ameri-
can Literature and Culture Association. She has published extensively in Saul Bellow
studies and in the fi elds of Jewish American and African American literatures. She
recently edited, with Alan L. Berger, the Jewish American Literature Encyclopedia .
Kirk Curnutt is Professor and Chair of English at Troy University Montgomery. He
is the author of two novels, Breathing Out the Ghost and Dixie Noir , as well as several
other books, including The Cambridge Introduction to F. Scott Fitzgerald and Coffee with
Hemingway .
Martha J. Cutter is an Associate Professor of English and African American Studies
at the University of Connecticut and the editor of MELUS: Multi - Ethnic Literature of
the United States . Her fi rst book, Unruly Tongue: Identity and Voice in American Women ’ s
Writing 1850 – 1930 , won the 2001 Nancy Dasher Award from the College English
Association. Her second book,
Lost and Found in Translation: Contemporary Ethnic
American Writing and the Politics of Language Diversity , was published in 2005. Her
articles have appeared in
American Literature , African American Literature , Callaloo ,
Women ’ s Studies , Arizona Quarterly , MELUS , Legacy , Criticism , and in the collections Mixed Race Literature and Passing and the Fictions of Identity .
Josephine Donovan has written or edited eleven books in literary criticism, feminist
theory, and animal ethics, including New England Local Color Literature ; Sarah Orne
Jewett ; After the Fall: The Demeter - Persephone Myth in Wharton, Cather, and Glasgow ;<
br />
Feminist Theory: The Intellectual Traditions ; “ Uncle Tom ’ s Cabin ” : Evil, Affl iction and
Redemptive Love ; and Gnosticism in Modern Literature . Most recently, she co - edited (with
Carol J. Adams) The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics . She is Professor Emerita
of English at the University of Maine.
Charles Duncan
is Professor of English, Head of the English Department, and
Moderator of the Faculty at Peace College, where he teaches American and African
American Literature. He has published two books, The Absent Man: The Narrative Craft
of Charles W. Chesnutt and The Northern Stories of Charles W. Chesnutt , as well as several
articles on Chesnutt, the fi rst African American fi ction writer to earn a national
x
Notes on Contributors
reputation. In addition, he has written essays on fi gures including James Baldwin,
Frank Norris, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Kate Chopin, Herman Melville, Nathaniel
Hawthorne, and Timothy Flint.
Benjamin F. Fisher , Professor of English, University of Mississippi, has many pub-
lications focusing upon or related to Poe and his writings. He is a past president of
the Poe Studies Association. Fisher is a member of editorial boards for the Edgar Allan
Poe Review, Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism , Gothic Studies, Victorian Poetry, and several
other journals. He has recently published The Cambridge Introduction to Edgar Allan
Poe (2008), has forthcoming from University of Iowa Press, Edgar Allan Poe in His
Own Times , and another book about Poe (The Contemporary Reviews) with Cambridge
University Press. In 1988 Fisher was awarded a Governor ’ s Citation, State of Mary-
land, for his outstanding contributions to Poe studies.
Andrew J. Furer has taught at the University of Connecticut, Harvard University,
Emerson College, and Fordham University. He is the author of essays on such writers
as Jack London, Stephen Crane, and James Weldon Johnson, including the fi rst major
article - length overview of London ’ s racial views, as well as a similar essay on London ’ s
ideal of “ the new womanhood. ” Furer is the editor of a forthcoming volume, The
Genders of Naturalism , and is currently working on a book - length study of London ’ s
radicalism. His other research interests include Zitkala - Sa, Paul Robeson, Richard
Wright, Bernarr Macfadden, and Jazz and Literature.
Andrew Furman is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of
English at Florida Atlantic University. His essays and articles on American literature