The Short Story in English

Designed for students and teachers of the short story at the college and high school levels, this bibliography covers American, Canadian, and British authors and stories most frequently anthologized for classroom study, plus a few authors the editors believe have been unjustly neglected. Opening chapters cover reference works, bibliographies, histories of the short story, and short story theory, including the most important new thinking on the genre. Chapters on individual authors (arranged alphabetically) include standard biographies, general critical studies, and discussions of individual stories, particularly those frequently anthologized and studied in the classroom. Throughout, the emphasis is on books and journal articles (from Studies in Short Fiction and Modern Fiction Studies especially) readily available to students and teachers in college or public libraries. Annotations are detailed, providing not only a synopsis of the content, but also the author's approach (Biographical, formalist, structuralist, psychological, etc.). Highly technical or very difficult studies are generally not included. The result is a comprehensive and easy to use guide to the scholarship and criticism on a wide range of important British and American short story writers, ranging in time from Robert Lewis Stevenson and Edgar Allan Poe to Raymond Carter and Alice Munro.