Joel is still posting excerpts from Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson (see this LH post), and in RLS First Tries Writing Fiction I was struck by this tidbit:
The term “short story” seems to have been used for the first time in 1884 by the American critic Brander Matthews, to describe a distinct kind of condensed and focused narrative, as opposed to a tale that merely happens to be short.
Naturally, I wanted to find out more. Sure enough, Wikipedia says:
In 1884, Brander Matthews, the first American professor of dramatic literature, published The Philosophy of the Short-Story. During that same year, Matthews was the first one to name the emerging genre “short story”.
Which is referenced to the Britannica article “Brander Matthews | American writer,” but that doesn’t mention either the book or his alleged invention of the term. So I turned to the OED, whose entry was revised just this year:
A prose work of fiction, typically able to be read in a single sitting, and (in later use) frequently conceived as a means of exploring a single incident or sequence and evoking a particular emotional response in the reader; (with the) this as a literary genre. Cf. novella n., novelette n. 1.
The proliferation of literary magazines and periodicals in the first half of the 19th cent. afforded more opportunities for self-contained, relatively short works of fiction to be published. In the Anglophone literary tradition, the artistic possibilities of this form of writing were explored and discussed by a number of writers in the mid 19th cent. (including Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe), leading to its recognition as a distinct genre by the late 19th cent. Cf. Compounds C.1, Compounds C.2 for a reflection of these developments.1822 The author of these ‘Lights and Shadows’..has published a volume of short stories, chiefly of a rural kind.
Scots Magazine July 59/21843 If I were writing a novel, this would be thought a great fault, but as it is only a short story, perhaps I shall be forgiven.
Ladies’ Cabinet August 1151877 His various books have been eminently readable, in the highest sense of the adjective, and some of his short stories have been almost without a flaw in their glittering beauty.
Independent 17 May 9/21896 The novelist who works on a large scale..is seldom master of the art of the short story.
Publishers’ Circular 25 April 447/31923 Mr H. G. Wells’s definition of the short story as a fiction that can be read in a quarter of an hour.
J. M. Murry, Pencillings 82
[…]
You will notice there’s no mention of Brander Matthews, and I’m guessing his role has been exaggerated. But the question of how to tell a mere “prose work of fiction, typically able to be read in a single sitting” from the putatively more advanced version “exploring a single incident or sequence and evoking a particular emotional response in the reader” is a nice one, and I’m not sure how one could be sure which one the citations from 1822 to 1877 were using. For that matter, I’m not sure whether I myself could tell one from the other. But then I’m not a professor or a literary critic, just a humble blogger.
I’m not sure how one could be sure which one the citations from 1822 to 1877 were using — I guess for this task, OED quotations are merely citations for the reader to look up rather than self-contained proofs. Note also “Cf. Compounds C.1, Compounds C.2 for a reflection of these developments.”
Fair enough. Compounds C.1 is “With agent nouns and verbal nouns, forming compounds in which short story expresses the object of the underlying verb, as in short story writer, short story writing, etc.” (1843 The feuilletonists, or short story-tellers); Compounds C.2 is “General use as a modifier, as in short story author, short story collection, short story competition, etc.” (1887 A short-story motive or a long-story motive).
Beats me.
Here’s an 1828 attempt at explanation.
“My dear children…I shall not tell you a story from the Bible to-night; but relate an anecdote (which you know, means a short story) of some little children of our acquaintance….”
A Short Essay to Do Good. Catherine Maria Sedgewick. Stockton, Mass., p. 20
https://www.google.com/books/edition/A_Short_Essay_to_Do_Good/Bc672qZBiVwC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22short+story%22&pg=PA20&printsec=frontcover
… as Taciturn pretells, our wrongstoryshortener …
In the Canterbury Tales, The Pardoner’s Tale and The Nun’s Priest’s Tale would both qualify as short stories by the definition of Brander Matthews. Perhaps the term was a form of marketing for literary magazines: an attempt to make their product more acceptable to their middle class audience than the idea of occupying their time reading “tales”.
The Pardoner’s Tale is found all over Africa and Asia; in all its avatars, it goes back ultimately to a Buddhist Jātaka tale.*
In the Kusaal version, the actual Bodhisattva has dropped out of the picture, but the three brigands suffer the same fate as usual.
Radix malorum est cupiditas, as the Kusaasi say.
* Mary Hamel and Charles Merrill: The Analogues of the ‛Pardoner’s Tale’ and a New African Version. The Chaucer Review, vol. 26, no. 2, 1991.
Edgar Allan Poe was talking about what made an effective short story in the early end of that range, though I don’t know what words he used for it.
I just learned the term “flash fiction”, also known as short short stories. I knew the genre but not a term for it.
Interesting. I do feel like there’s a difference between a short story in a literary sense and a tale that just happens to be short (an anecdote is definitely not always a publishable short story), but I couldn’t start to define it…
(Is a ‘classic’ fairy tale a short story? My initial instinct is no – it’s just a story – but I expect I’ll be proved wrong.)
I remember reading the preface to a fairly recent short story anthology (Penguin, I think), where the editor rejected any definition of a short story as anything else but a story that happens to be short (without any definite limits for what constitutes “short”). In German literary scholarship (where essentialist genre definitions have been always very popular) there is a difference between a kurze Geschichte (or kurze Erzählung, which is more idiomatic) on the one hand and a Kurzgeschichte on the other. Some of E. T: A. Hoffmann’s tales may have been short, but they were not Kurzgeschichten; Heinrich Böll, on the other hand, was a writer of Kurzgeschichten.
Very vaguely I also remember someone claiming that the first writers of short stories in the modern sense were Chekhov and Joyce. (Didn’t Katherine Mansfield plagiarize one of Chekhov’s stories which were at that time not that well known in the English-speaking (or reading) world?).
Interesting that the WP article on “flash fiction” ropes in not only Jātaka tales but Nasreddin stories and even Zen koans.
Seems to me that at that rate you could even subsume African proverbs of the “microanecdote” type under this label, like
Kʋkɔma da zab taaba asɔn’e bi’ela yɛla.
“Lepers once fought each other about who was a bit better.”
And if you accept stories in the historic present, why not even
Dawana zabid taaba udnɛɛr yɛla.
“Pigeons fight each other over an empty husk.”
Peter Jackson could probably make a trilogy out of it.
Very vaguely I also remember someone claiming that the first writers of short stories in the modern sense were Chekhov and Joyce.
I hope that person defined the modern sense (singular) and justified their definition.
All the way down to school. I was taught the distinguishing characteristics of a Kurzgeschichte; one is that it doesn’t have any kind of introduction but starts within the plot, and then you have to figure things out from the context as it drips in.
Short story[–novelette]–novella–novel
distinguished solely by word count. Simples, as the millennials used to say.
I remember a time when some writers spelled it “shortstory,” perhaps by analogy with Kurzgeschichte, perhaps simply because it’s accented as a single sword.
Huh, turns out my latest preprint is a novella…
But does it fulfill Goethe’s criteria for a Novelle (“eine sich ereignete unerhörte Begebenheit”)?
Or Wieland’s definition: “Novellen werden vorzüglich eine Art von Erzählung genannt, welche sich von den großen Romanen durch die Simplizität des Planes und den kleinen Umfang der Fabel unterscheiden”?
These are the definitions I was taught at school.
Which reminds me of the German translation of Kropotkin’s (the anarchist’s) book on Russian literature (the original was written in English) – the translator always translated “novel” by “Novelle”, even when Kropotkin was writing about War and Peace or The Brothers Karamazov (btw, like Nabokov and Conrad, he couldn’t stand Dostoyevsky).
it’s accented as a single [word].
Not for me it isn’t, and I don’t remember hearing it that way. For me it’s always two separately accented words: short story.
For me it’s always two separately accented words: short story.
Same for me. -rtst- is not a consonant cluster in my English, so even as two words it’s rather laboured to pronounce.
I don’t remember ever hearing “short story” stressed as a single word either (presumably that means stressed SHORT, unstressed story, no pause?).
Quoted from Wikipedia: “In 1884, Brander Matthews, the first American professor of dramatic literature, published The Philosophy of the Short-Story.” To be precise, what Matthews published in 1884 was an anonymous essay in Saturday Review, declaring, with capitals, that “a Short Story worthy of the name is something more than a story that is short.” This was eventually reworked and expanded into the book The Philosophy of the Short-story (1901), where he hyphenated “the Short-story”, with only one capital, and also capitalized “the Novel”.
Checking onelook.com: all dictionaries that give a pronunciation for “short story” place the main stress on the first syllable of “story”, as I expected. Also, that site indexes Green’s, which informed me that “short story” = “(US Und.) a forged cheque.”
When referring to the genre, I have the main accent on “short”. I probably got that from my English teachers.
There are a good number of English set expressions of the form adjective + noun that have not been amalgamated into compounds (i.e. where the principal stress has not shifted to the adjective), e.g. “blank cheque”, “dead end.”. Some vary, like “short cut/shortcut.” I have the impression that compounding is generally commoner in USian than UKanian.
Kusaal adjectives compound with their (preceding) head nouns anyway, so there are no morphological or phonological cues to alert you to the fact that e.g. gɔn’ɔsabilig actually means “Acacia hockii“, rather than just any old “black thorn.”
Can I with the greatest possible respect for Kusaal’s pre-eminence as a world language suggest it’s sometimes quite useful to be able to distinguish /ˈblækˌθɔːn/ or even /ˈblækˌθɔɹn/ [**] rather than just any old “black thorn.”
[**] Prunus spinosa, it seems: Europe, western Asia, north Africa. Your Acacia ” moist savannah landscapes of sub-Saharan Africa”.
I continue to be unable to get my mouth round ‘shortstory as a monolect.
@AntC
I suppose the intended pronunciation is like that of history (not historical).
When I first moved to the UK, I soon realised that “peanut butter” was stressed differently: [ˌpinʌt ˈbʌtə] rather than what I had grown up with, [ˈpʰinət ˌbʌɾɚ]. I assume this is not unrelated to the fact that, at the time, peanut butter was a staple food in America but a weird minority taste in England.
I’ve never really figured out what’s buttery about it. Why is it not just peanut spread?
I’m surprised to learn (from the OED) that apple butter (a1813) and pumpkin butter (1840) are older than peanut butter (1894). All are originally US.
A guess on apple butter and pumpkin butter (which is new to me) compared to peanut butter.
Pumpkins are native and apples may have been introduced more widely and earlier than peanuts, or at least sooner accepted as a common US food. And, with peanut allergies reportedly on the wane, resurging. With a relative who is a peanut farmer, I may be a booster.
Peanuts are great — I eat them myself and put them out for the birds and squirrels. And I love peanut butter sandwiches (though I’ve only met one other person who has them with butter — I hate jelly).
My mother grew up in Winchester, VA, which has a big Apple Blossom Festival every spring, and she was very fond of apple butter (as am I). Her mother used to like salt-rising bread but took horrible yeast tablets to get her missing B vitamins. Speaking of which, does anybody but Aussies (and me) prefer Vegemite to Marmite?
https://theonion.com/australian-prisoner-sues-for-right-to-eat-vegemite/
And I love peanut butter sandwiches (though I’ve only met one other person who has them with butter — I hate jelly).
Butter? There’s not enough fat in peanut butter? But though I don’t hate jelly, I agree with not putting it on the sandwich.
Peanut butter sandwich:
Ingredients
2 slices 100% whole-grain bread. (May be sourdough, may contain ingredients such as fruits and nuts.)
Peanut butter consisting only of ground peanuts, salt optional, preferably ground by you in the machine in the health-food store.
Spread one slice of bread with peanut butter to taste. Cover with other slice. Optional: cut in half.
You will never go back (if you’re me, anyway).
Freshly ground cashew butter is the best butter.
In Dutch it’s even cheese (pindakaas)…
One of those mysteries like Christmas Day. Iä! Iä!
I conjecture that in “peanut butter,” “apple butter” etc., “butter” is simply a word for “spread,” which (as a noun) strikes me a a 20th-century-sounding word. (I don’t wish to look it up at the moment.)
@rodgerC
There are recipes for almond butter / cheese going back to the 1400s. I suppose the “cheese” part had some solids filtered out of it using a cloth (maybe something like rennet or moss was also added, although the recipe I saw only said sugar). I believe “butter” might be used not because spread but because preserved (with salt or sugar).
OED s.v. spread (entry revised 2016):
The slang use of spread for butter dates from 1811.
I refer you to the classic study in which William Labov went to bookstores all around Manhattan asking “Excuse me, what section has Raymond Carver?”
It was called peanut paste in several Australian states for several decades from the 1930s, as a result of rules on using “butter” in packaging prompted by the arrival of butter-alternatives.
Oh, the same fuss as about “milk” or “meat” nowadays – history repeats itself…