Short story theories : a twenty-first-century perspective / edited by Viorica Patea.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. The beginnings of the short story and the legacy of Poe. The short story: an overview of the history and evolution of the genre / Viorica Patea ; The paratactic structure in the Canterbury tales: two antecedents of the modern short story / Antonio López Santos ; Anticipating aestheticism: the dynamics of reading and reception in Poe / Peter Gibian ; Revising theory: Poe's legacy in short story criticism / Erik Van Achter -- 2. The linguistic turn: discourse analysis, cognitive theories and pragmatism. Frames speaking: Malamud, Silko, and the reader / Per Winther ; A cognitive approach to short story writing / Pilar Alonso ; Code-switching as a strategy of brevity in Sandra Cisneros' Woman Hollering Creek and other stories / Consuelo Montes-Granado -- 3. Borders, postcolonialism, orality, and gender. The yellow hybrids: gender and genre in Gilman's Wallpaper / Carolina Núñez-Puente ; Short narrations in a letter frame: cases of genre hybridity in postcolonial literature in Portuguese / Rebeca Hernández ; Short-storyness and eyewitnessing / María Jesús Hernáez Lerena ; Margaret Atwood's Art of brevity: metaphorical conceptualization and short story writing / Teresa Gibert ; Body politics: female dynamics in Isabel Allende's The stories of Eva Luna / Farhat Iftekharuddin -- 4. Postmodernism and the twenty-first century: intertextuality, minifiction, serial narration. Intertextuality and collage in Barthelme's short fiction / Luisa María González Rodríguez ; Realism and narrators in Tobias Wolff's short stories / Santiago Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan ; The boundaries of serial narrative / Lauro Zavala ; The American short story in the twenty-first century / Charles May.

"Short Story Theories: A Twenty-First-Century Perspective problematizes different aspects of the renewal and development of the short story. The aim of this collection is to explore the most recent theoretical issues raised by the short story as a genre and to offer theoretical and practical perspectives on the form. Centering as it does on specific authors and on the wider implications of short story poetics, this collection presents a new series of essays that both reinterpret canonical writers of the genre and advance new critical insights on the most recent trends and contemporary authors. Theorizations about genre reflect on different aspects of the short story from a multiplicity of perspectives and take the form of historical and aesthetic considerations, gender-centered accounts, and examinations that attend to reader-response theory, cognitive patterns, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, postcolonial studies, postmodern techniques, and contemporary uses of minimalist forms. Looking ahead, this collection traces the evolution of the short story from Chaucer through the Romantic writings of Poe to the postmodern developments and into the twenty-first century. This volume will prove of interest to scholars and graduate students working in the fields of the short story and of literature in general. In addition, the readability and analytical transparence of these essays make them accessible to a more general readership interested in fiction."--Publisher's website.