Humankind told stories for tens of thousands of years before the first writing, sometimes using poetry to make them more memorable both to the teller and the audience.
Classical Greece Aesop’s fables. Being written as prose rather than verse might suggest they were valued more for their morals and observations than as literature.
Religious Tales and Parables Such as The Book of Jonah and The Rich Fool recorded by Luke. The Old Testament also contains parables.
The Panchatantra A collection of animal fables perhaps first collated c. 250 BCE. The original was in Sanskrit. Others think it may be much older. Authorship has been attributed to Vishnu Sharma; estimates for whose birth and death vary widely. Much translated over the centuries and across Asia and Europe. Employs a frame narrative, an overarching story, a device much used if not copied by many other collections of tales in the centuries that followed.
Lucius Apuleius Madaurensis (c. 124 – 170 CE) Apuleius came from what is now Algeria. His Metamorphoses, while about a central character and described as a Latin novel, includes discrete short stories.
Mediaeval Christianity Contes dévots or pious stories and hagiographies or episodes from the life of a saint were included in books such as An Alphabet of Tales, by Etienne Besancon (died 1294).
Gesta Romanorum or Deeds of the Romans first existed as manuscripts that allowed for this collection of tales and anecdotes in Latin and later German to be amended and added to before becoming more fixed thanks to printing. Perhaps it first appeared c. 1300. There is debate about whether the first copy existed in France, Germany or England. The collection became a source for later works including Chaucer, Boccaccio, and Shakespeare.
One Thousand and One Nights May have originated in India with the collection of tales expanding in Persia, Arabic speaking countries and again during the preparation of European editions. The oldest surviving fragment in Arabic is believed to have been written in the ninth century. French and then English versions went on sale in 1704 and 1706.
Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) Wrote The Decameron c.1348 – 1353. The one-hundred tales range from bawdy to tragic.
Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343 –1400) 24 stories believed to have been written c.1386 – 1395. Most are in verse but the tales of Melibee and The Parson are in prose.
Marguerite of Navarre (1492–1549) Wrote The Heptameron in the period leading up to her death. A collection of 72 short stories using a frame narrative.
Miguel de Cervantes (1547 – 1616) wrote twelve short stories between 1590 and 1612. These were printed in 1613 as Novelas Emplares (Exemplary Stories). The first part of his Don Quixote, which appeared in 1605, contains a number of tales related by characters that are not integral to the main story.
Johann Karl August Musäus (1735-87) published Volksmährchen der Deutschen (Folktales of the Germans) in 1782. Despite the title, the tales are literary and devoid of fantastical elements. Musäus drew inspiration from ordinary people telling their traditional tales.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 –1832) published his Conversations of German Emigrants in 1795. His Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years was conceived around the same time, but did not appear until 1821. Some of Goethe’s short stories, such as The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, helped spark the interest in the more fantastical German folklore that led other German-speaking scholars to present literary versions of fairy tales and legends, including collections in the early 19th century by Ludwig Tieck, Heinrich von Kleist, Clemens Brentano, Ernst Hoffmann and the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm.
Washington Irving (1783 –1859) Often seen as the father of the short story in the USA. Published The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent in instalments during 1819 – 1820. Among the short stories included are Rip van Winkel and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Irving had translated works by German folklorists.
The nineteenth century saw increased literacy, a bigger market for literature and advances in printing technology that contributed to a growth in periodicals, which in turn created a demand for short stories, especially in Russia, the USA and France.
Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin (1799 –1837) Often regarded as the founder of modern Russian literature. Among his briefer fiction are The Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin (1831), which consists of five short stories with an introduction by a fictional character. Although highly-regarded as a poet he turned more to prose after 1830.
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804 -1864) published his first collection of short stories Twice-Told Tales, in 1837. His stories include psychological insights, ambiguous endings and tighter structures than, say, Irving. And Hawthorne, who used a wide range of themes and genres, has been credited as the first to write a science fiction short story; The Artist of the Beautiful published in 1846 features a robotic insect.
Hans Christian Andersen (1805 – 1875). Built on the success of the Grimms to make fairy stories in print a staple of childhood reading around the world. He began publishing collections of stories in 1835.
Edgar Allan Poe (1809 –1849) called his short stories prose tales. He published his first, Metzengerstein: A Tale in Imitation of the German, in 1832. As the title might suggest, the treatment is Gothic, to the point of including a gloomy castle and two feuding families. He may have come to regret adding the subtitle as he defended his work against accusations of “Germanism” when he published his first collection of short stories, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque in 1839. He has been acknowledged as the founder of detective fiction, for developing horror fiction and and literary theorizing relating to short stories.
Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol (1809 –1852) Began publishing collections of short stories in 1831. He is noted for his great imagination, humour, caricature and use of the grotesque while remaining rooted in realism. His work is seen as being as open to interpretation as Shakespeare’s plays.
Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (1818 – 1883) His Sportsman’s Sketches, an anthology of short stories that had previously appeared in periodicals, was published in 1852. Such was the power of his realism the stories contributed to his house arrest and helped promote the abolition of serfdom. He provided much detail for his characters regardless of rank and showed much interest in their psychologies.
Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant (1850 –1893) Noted for his clever plotting, twists in the tale and interest in psychopathology. Influenced by Realism, but also wrote fantastical fiction.
The short story got its name in 1885 ~ The first American professor of dramatic literature, Brander Matthews, published The Philosophy of the Short Story, theorizing, “The short-story is the single effect, complete and self-contained, while the novel is of necessity broken into a series of episodes. Thus the short-story has … the effect of ‘totality,’ as Poe called it, the unity of impression.”
The short story writer, Matthews noted, must possess “ingenuity, originality, and compression,” as well as a touch of fantasy.
However, the term short story only became widely accepted in the twentieth century.
Anton Chekhov (1860 – 1904) advocated that authentic writing seeks to depict the world itself, not an interpretation of it. He wrote hundreds of stories before 1888 and less that fifty after that date. These later stories are what would now be recognised as modern short stories or Chekhovian. See below.
The Modern Short Story
Many curious objects have appeared as exhibits in art galleries. Regardless of whether the viewing public regard such things as a pile of bricks or a pickled shark as art, stopping to stare in awe or puzzlement impacts our perception.
Modern short stories have the same potential. Authors can take something mundane and, provided the writing motivates the reader to complete the story with sufficient attention, she or he is left with one or more of the following; altered feelings, insights and ideas. In a gallery, an exhibit that encourages the viewer to pause for longer and provides an emotional connection is more likely to stimulate new thinking. Much the same is true for short stories; there is reading where words go in and are soon forgotten and reading that is visceral and memorable.
Older paintings that feature faces, as opposed to landscapes and still life, tend to be about religious figures, nobles, myths, heroic fighters and exceptional beauty. Older forms of the short story, often had the same subjects and a tendency towards moralizing or supporting the status quo. This began to change in the nineteenth century with authors like Poe. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Anton Chekhov marks a significant stage in the development of the modern short story. His later work is noted for:
1) Less concern with plot and more with a character’s subjective experience.
2) Focus on ordinary people in everyday situations.
3) Less concern for tidy endings and little time for happy endings because life is not tidy and psychological flaws do not easily go away. Chekhovian endings often prompt the readers to question what they expected by way of an ending.
4) Detachment rather than judging or moralizing.
5) Understatement – the writing hints at more than what is described or presented as dialogue.
6) Anti-climaxes – events turn out to depend on something trivial. Conflict is not resolved, but continues.
7) Irony – the results of characters’ actions are often at odds with what they wanted or expected.
8) A flash of insight, also known as an epiphany, as a result of events or reflecting on them. However, not all of the characters make the changes in their lives that the insight might suggest to the reader.
9) Tragicomic. Chekhov’s outlook was often bleak; people are all too weak and often isolated despite their families and acquaintances. They feel helpless, hopeless and they fail to communicate what most bothers them. However, Chekhov draws humour from human frailty.
Since Chekhov the literary short story has been marked by:
• A preference for non-heroic characters. Often these are on the margins of society in terms of wealth and power or they feel alienated from prevailing values and preoccupations.
• Tauter prose
• Revealing the key aspects of the central character’s psychology, which often involves internal conflict, or lacks coherence, or is disturbing
• Characters either undergoing a crisis or at a peak of achievement. Both of these can help to explore the nature of a person.
• Making the familiar unfamiliar through a novel perspective that intrigues and/or puts the reader on edge
• Willingness to experiment and take fiction in new directions
