The modernist short story : theory and practice in five authors

I am proposing a connection between the generic capacities of the short story and the way in which writers have depicted their social world, a connection which stems from a special kind of literary experience relevant to readers, as well as to writers, of short stories. LP. Hartley, discussing the status of the short story in the sixties, noted how readers were apt to 'devour them singly on a news sheet' but would be disinclined to read them in collections. The reason for this was (and is) the 'unusual concentration’ the genre demands, a concentration which permits no respite in a series of short stories because '"starting and stopping” exhausts the reader's attention just as starting and stopping uses up the petrol In a car'.* Hartley's yardstick was the comparatively favourable fate of the novel, and this same comparison - novel versus short story — has proved pervasive in short story criticism, as we shall see. The main point here, however, is Hartley's emphasis on a unique kind of attention demanded by the short story. Susan Lohafer writes that short stories 'put us through something — reality warp is the shorthand for it', and this may be the best shorthand definition we can come up with, indicating as it does two key elements of the short story: its intensity and its exaggerated artifice.