Short Story Novella

THE SHORT STORY & THE NOVELLA
 THE SHORT STORY
1. Commercialism
Short works of fiction published in magazines in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries generally earned far more per word for their authors than did long
novels.
As fewer commercial magazines publish short stories the general public continues to
avoid it, and the short story rises in critical favour, not only among professors, but
among literary reviewers.
2. Size
Shorter than the novel and the novella.
In English Literature it is difficult to fix an aesthetic borderline between the short story
and the novella (according to some critics).
3. Oral or written?
If the short story is linked to oral narratives, then it has a long pedigree. Many recent
commentators have resisted this conclusion and the tendency in the past hundred years
has been to associate the short story with print rather than with speech.
4. Modern – and unique?
The short story is a modern art form, not associated with the tradition of the spoken
tale (for some critics).
There can be no development of character in the short story. Characters in a short story
may undergo shocking experiences and they may experience dramatic illuminations
(Joyce’s “epiphany”), but these are, nonetheless, different from that gradual
development of character that we can observe in a full-length novel.
5. Fragments and wholes
At the heart of the short story has to reside the writer’s ability to make fragments of
experience speak for the whole of life.
1
The pre-eminence of the short story as a modernist genre grew out of the modern
highbrow audience’s acceptance of fragmentation as an accurate model of the world,
with a concomitant focus on “being” rather than the “becoming” that characterizes the
plot of the Romantic and the Victorian novel.
Short-story theorists have continued to distinguish between two different kinds of (or
structures for) the short story:
a) The anecdotal story: it presents an Aristotelian action with a beginning,
middle and end.
b) The epiphanic story: it unfolds particular sensations or emotions and
proceeds to a climactic revelation that does not necessarily take the form of a
complete overt action.
6. Telling and suggesting
The short-story writer must be adept at replacing direct telling by suggesting. This
means that a short-story writer does not directly tell us things so much as let us guess
or know them by implying them. The technical advantage is obvious. It takes a long
time to tell anything directly and explicitly, it is a rather heavy-handed way of
conveying information, and it does not arrest our imagination or hold our attention so
firmly as when we get a subtle hint.
Openings of short stories in particular demand of the author that he or she be adept at
influencing the reader by means of suggestion and implication.
The short story is normally read at one sitting. Because of this the reading of a short
story tends to be less reflective and more concentrated an experience.
Rather than showing its characters developing and maturing, the short story will show
them at some revealing moment of crisis—whether internal or external. Short stories
rarely have complex plots; again, the focus is upon a particular episode or situation
rather than a chain of events.
Very often the short-story writer will use something akin to shock tactics to make the
reader think and respond: an unexpected ending, a dramatic unveiling, a surprising
twist of plot.
Two kinds of suggestion may be used:

a) The suggester knows exactly what it is that he/she wants the target person
to think.
b) A person’s imagination is stimulated to be innovative and to think of things
that the suggester him-or herself has never intended.
The use of poetic devices such as repetition and chiasmus (“falling faintly” – “faintly
falling”: pattern “ab ba”), symbolism, and other techniques are not limited to the short
story, but very often have to carry a heavier weight in this genre to compensate for the
limitations that a restriction of length places on the development of plot and character.
2
Two views on the short story:
a) Edgar Allan Poe
By exploiting opportunities denied to the novelist, and by strictly controlling the reading
experience, the story teller is able to convey high excitements and profound effects
comparable to those created in lyric poetry. And in order to do this, the writer must be sharply
conscious of every stage of composition (…) If his very initial sentence tend not to the
outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there
should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-
established design. […] and by such means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length
painted ‘which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with kindred art, a sense of the
fullest satisfaction. The idea of the tale has been presented unblemished, because undisturbed;
and this is an end unattainable in the novel.
b) Valerie Shaw
In some respects the Short Story belongs more and more lastingly with photography –in
particular snapshot photography which dates from the same period as the Modern Short
Story-than with the film. Because the short story depicts one phase of a process of action, the
complete time-structure and experience of duration offered by film can be telescoped into a
single striking image in which drama is inherent. If the photographic image is defined as a
self-sufficient illumination which does not require the help of ‘plot’ or ‘story’ to give it
meaning, then it is possible to say that the creation of images which do not need to be
elaborated or explained, but which do expand in the reader’s mind, is the storyteller’s method
of achieving a comparable effect.
 THE NOVELLA
The term is usually used to categorize works of prose fiction that hover between the
short story and the novel in length (between about forty or fifty and a hundred pages
long).
It has enjoyed a greater prominence in Germany than it has elsewhere in Europe.
The novella often has a dominant symbol or complex of symbols at its heart. It is these
rather than the complexity of its plot that gives the novella its depth and significance.
Example in English Literature: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902).

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THE SHORT STORY & THE NOVELLA

 THE SHORT STORY

Shorter than the novel and the novella.

4. Modern – and unique?

5. Fragments and wholes

6. Telling and suggesting

Two kinds of suggestion may be used:

a) Edgar Allan Poe

It has enjoyed a greater prominence in Germany than it has elsewhere in Europe.

Example in English Literature: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902).

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