Of the significant influences on T. S. Eliot's life and work, religion is the most often misunderstood and misrepresented. The essential reason for this is the failure to take the poet at his word in several important statements that he made about his Christianity, at different points in his life. We also need to give careful attention to the ways in which he wrote about the experience of faith in his poems, and in his correspondence, too, now that several volumes of his letters have been published.

Eliot announced, in 1928, that the position that he had adopted (with regard to religion) was that of an “anglo-catholic” (CP3 513). It is necessary to be clear about what that statement means and what it does not mean. Characteristically, Eliot presents us with a precise formula. And his declaration, especially in that twentieth-century inter-war period of burgeoning conviction and confidence in the Anglo-Catholic movement in the Church of England, amounted to an unequivocal public expression of allegiance to an increasingly conspicuous variety of faith and practice. Eliot was to remain faithful to this for the rest of his life. He was not merely a “High Church” Anglican; he had not, by embracing Anglo-Catholicism, joined the “establishment” (quite the contrary, in fact), and he had not become, as some confused commentators seem to believe, a “Catholic,” apparently meaning to designate, by that term, a Roman Catholic. “Mon point de vue est Anglo-Catholique et pas Catholique de Rome,” [“My point of view is Anglo-Catholic and not Roman Catholic”] Eliot wrote to Jacques Maritain in 1927 (L3 620). Others refer to “the Anglo-Catholic Church” and Eliot joining it. There was and is no such body. Eliot pointed out emphatically in some notes on Northrop Frye's book about him: “One does not join an Anglo-Catholic wing!” (L3 573n1). And, usually, people speak of Eliot's “conversion” to Christianity. Not only did Eliot not undergo a conversion experience, but he firmly deprecated the idea, both with regard to his own religious experience and to any influence that his faith or his references to it in his work might have on others.

The novella – often considered to be the most sophisticated mode of short fiction – has attracted some of the most renowned authors writing in English from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards. It is, however, a complex mode, so complex, in fact, that no one seems quite able to define it. The question of length is often taken as a starting point to identify a prose form mid-way between a novel and a short story, but this tells us nothing about the specifics of its formal features, or aesthetic effects. This problem is compounded, because – as Malgorzata Trebisz observes – there are no particular literary techniques used exclusively by any one of the fictional prose forms: similar techniques can be found in the short story, the novella and the novel. According to Robert Scholes, the difference lies in the purpose for which certain techniques have been used within all three genres. Trebisz extends this argument further, noting that ‘there do exist certain techniques which statistically occur more frequently in the novellas than elsewhere’ (p. 2). This chapter will examine such techniques, using a variety of authors associated with the novella genre: Joseph Conrad, Henry James, James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, D. H. Lawrence, H. E. Bates, Alan Sillitoe and Ian McEwan. Mansfield in particular, in revising her novella ‘The Aloe’ into the more condensed ‘Prelude’, offers an unrivalled opportunity to witness the creation of one of modernism's most celebrated short fictions.

Ian McEwan, a contemporary author whose use of the novella is a vital component of his literary endeavours, has an almost messianic zeal for the genre, affirming – controversially – that ‘the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction’. Examining its long tradition, he reveals how the genre demands very different qualities in a writer from the novel, citing the demands of economy which ‘push writers to polish their sentences to precision and clarity, to bring off their effects with unusual intensity, to remain focused on the point of their creation and drive it forward with functional single-mindedness, and to end it with a mind to its unity’.

In May of 1897, the greatly prolific, and sometimes great, author and critic Margaret Oliphant wrote ‘A Preface: On the Ebb Tide’ describing ‘the strange discovery which a man makes when he finds himself carried away by the retiring waters, no longer coming in upon the top of the wave, but going out’. 1897 was Queen Victoria's jubilee year, and the coincidence of those celebrations for an aged monarch with the ebbing of the century, made for a cultural moment of reflection and a retrospective gaze over the long Victorian era.

In her own career, Oliphant had always been a canny and reliable author in touch with the cultural moment and the publishing market, so in her writing of an ‘ebb tide’ she was yet again in tune with her readership. But for Oliphant this was as much a personal ‘strange discovery’ of ending as it was cultural: she died just over a month after her preface was published, but even in this preface to a book of short stories she was not writing about death itself, but – to her mind – the more difficult ending of a career. She contemplates the artist's realization that the public is no longer interested in his or her work, even though he or she still feels a vigorous creativity. In fact ‘On the Ebb Tide’ introduces her book of short stories The Ways of Life (1897) that republished ‘Mr Sandford’ (1888) and ‘The Wonderful History of Mr Robert Dalyell’ (1892). In each of these stories, the artist outlives the acclaim and respect of his public.

After she died the critics wrote of Oliphant that she had not outlived her relevance or become simply a voice of the past, and that her reputation would survive. Perhaps they were being kind, because it has to be admitted that Oliphant's work did not, unlike that of Anthony Trollope, to whom she was often compared, survive the modernist rejection of the Victorian three-decker novel, the ‘potboiler,’ and what was deemed to be the stuffy morality and heavy detail of plot and description in the novel and short fiction.

James Longenbach has argued that “Eliot forces his readers to feel the weight of his allusions very strongly.” The point is thought-provoking; forcing us to “feel the weight of … allusions” is part of that process of “assuming a double part” which Gareth Reeves notes is acknowledged as “an articulated and articulate strategy” in the terza rima passage in Little Gidding. In Eliot, allusion brings to mind a particular literary moment and a larger generic model. At the same time allusion finds a home in an imaginative world that is innovative.

This newness may often involve shaking us out of conventional responses, as when, in John Crowe Ransom's words, Eliot “inserts beautiful quotations into ugly contexts.” Ransom is discussing the use of Olivia's song from Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) in The Waste Land. Here, Eliot turns lyric melancholy into a simulacrum of automatic response. He does so by making us hear the original differently. That original (“When lovely woman stoops to folly”) has a tetrametric lilt and movement that are called up yet almost cancelled through the addition of “and” in line 253, “an unaccented syllable,” as Jason Harding points out. The reworking satirises lyric sentimentality. But it stops short of mere debunking; Eliot/Tiresias may have “foresuffered all” (CPP 69), yet there is something to be “suffered” in the scene, and the allusion suggests that there is, as well, residual value in the original lyric mode.

That value allows Eliot to express tacit sadness at the fate of the woman who “smoothes her hair with automatic hand, / And puts a record on the gramophone” (CPP 69). The quatrains of the passage's central section imitate the “automatic” nature of the sexual encounter they depict. The formal means are metronomic iambs and alternating, often sardonic rhymes: “guesses” and “caresses,” “tired” and “undesired” (CPP 68). However, as a whole, the passage accommodates disciplined feelings of yearning. Secret sympathy for the woman insinuates itself beneath the air of detachment. Her washing “perilously spread,” she is a descendant of the Keats who imagines voyages across “perilous seas, in fairy lands forlorn” (“Ode to a Nightingale,” line 70).

In thinking about ideas of newness and multiculturalism, it seems wise to begin with some historical contexts. Although the mid-twentieth century Caribbean migration that has come to be symbolized by the arrival of the SS Empire Windrush in June 1948 is often understood to be the ‘beginning’ of non-white arrival in Britain, there was in fact a black and Asian presence in Britain long before the late 1940s. As Peter Fryer writes in his memorable opening to Staying Power (1984), ‘There were Africans in Britain before the English came here. Some were soldiers in the Roman imperial army that occupied the southern part of our island for three and a half centuries. Others were slaves.’ If we look at the post-war period, however, there is little sense of this longer history of black residence in Britain. The apparent ‘forgetting’ of this pre-1948 black history in Britain has been crucial in refuting the legitimacy of black habitation in Britain in the post-war years. Admitting that black people have lived in Britain longer than (in Fryer's words) ‘the English’ makes it difficult to cast them as recent intruders, or even visitors, to the country. The rhetoric of invasion was used by figures like Enoch Powell, who gave voice to a discontent earlier expressed in the series of post-war ‘anti-black’ riots, such as those of 1958 in Nottingham and Notting Hill, and the associated increase in racist violence and police brutality.

It is also important to remember that migrants were writing long before they arrived in Britain. In the Caribbean, the short story was already a popular genre in the first half of the twentieth century, as shorter pieces of writing were more easily printed and disseminated in local news and magazine publications. As Bill Schwartz has argued, ‘West Indian emigrants came from societies well advanced in the prerequisites of breaking from colonialism … The typewritten novels and poems in their suitcases, their mimeographed manifestos, their music: all were testament to the depth of emergent anti-colonial sensibilities.’ As this quotation suggests, much of this literature was political, expressing discontent at Empire. This period of writing in Britain has been typified by Sam Selvon's novel The Lonely Londoners (1956), which contrasts migrants’ optimism and hope for a new life in Britain with the difficulties these men and women were little prepared for.

Oral and traditional story forms – from fable, myth, fairy tale and folk tale to religious parable – underwrote the nature and purpose of the short story from its earliest incarnations, offering powerful narrative models for authors to imitate, pastiche and subvert. The most obvious common feature of these forms is their didacticism: fables, myths, fairy tales, folk tales and parables are recounted and retold in order to instil specific moral and/or religious values, and to record cultural practices, passing on the wisdom of the ages while reinforcing a collective sense of identity among members of a given community, nation or religious group. Influential studies of the generic structures of oral and traditional written narratives by Vladimir Propp, Joseph Campbell and Northrop Frye reveal archetypal patterns which reflect certain universal aspects of human experience, but they also acknowledge how these structures are transformed across periods and cultures, registering both subtle and sweeping shifts in the nature of individual and social experience. Inflections in the use of the earlier forms in a particular national literature can tell us a great deal about changes in attitudes to the coherence of community identity and beliefs, especially during periods of marked historical change.

In this chapter, I will explore how late Victorian and early twentieth-century practitioners of the English short story adapted oral and traditional story forms to address their own historical situations. In doing so, I take for granted the pervasive influence on these writers of the Bible stories; of John Bunyan's religious allegory The Pilgrim's Progress (1678); of Greek and Roman mythology; of key transcriptions of oral tales such as Charles Perrault's Histoires ou contes du temps passé (1697) (Tales and Stories of the Past with Morals), Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1812) (known in English as Grimm's Fairy Tales) and Andrew Lang's twelve Fairy Book compilations of fairy tales (1889–1910); of Aesop's Fables and the fables of La Fontaine; of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales; and of written texts structured around a series of connected oral narratives, like Arabian Nights (first translated into English from Arabic in 1706), Giovanni Boccaccio's Decamerone (completed in 1353, but not translated into English, as The Decameron, until 1886) and Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

As a result of two wars, H. E. Bates claimed, the modern short story of his time was better than it had been ever before. Short story writer and anthologist Dan Davin felt that the short story ‘proved to be one of the hardiest blooms to survive in a time of devastation and weeds’. But why is the short story such a useful medium to writers in wartime? The particular conditions of publishing in wartime, from paper shortages to editorial constraints, seem to encourage the publication of short fiction in periodicals over the individual publication of long novels. The short story has also been described as a medium that ‘lends itself to the representation of experience fragmented by war’. Its brevity, its ability to capture snapshot views of life at war, and particularly its modernist, fragmented incarnation have been regarded as ideal means of expression in wartime, responding quickly to events, whether traumatic or mundane, without having to offer a panoramic overview. Compared to the larger-scale explorations of war novels and memoirs, the war story's ‘strength is its affinity to the experience of the mere moment, which goes hand in hand with a special closeness to its moment of publication and reception’. A time-strapped and anxious reading public may have turned to short stories because they ‘could at least be read quickly, in a single sitting’, offered ‘the satisfaction of immediate closure’, and did not require the same ‘lengthy emotional investment’ as novels. These qualities were not obviously new: they were pre-existing features that had made the short story popular with an increasingly literate British public before 1914. When the First World War broke out, the short story was an established (if notoriously ill-defined) form that happened to work particularly well within a wartime context of readers’ limited time, constant physical or emotional disruption, paper shortages and fragmented experience. These ostensible handicaps for the literary market in general all served to make the short prose form ‘an inescapable element of the wartime literary field’ and blackouts and the dangers of leaving the house after dark owing to lack of street lighting in both wars meant that ‘Reading – like knitting – flourished on the Home Front.’

In 1917, T. S. Eliot published “Eeldrop and Appleplex,” a prose dialogue between two figures modelled on caricatures of himself and Ezra Pound. Eeldrop is Eliot:

Eeldrop's test follows from a remark Appleplex makes about Edith: “‘Everyone says of her, “How perfectly impenetrable!” I suspect that within there is only the confusion of a dusty garret’” (CP1 530). Eeldrop picks up on Appleplex's “dusty garret,” but he is less explicit about the distinction between what may be within Edith's person and what may be around her; where Appleplex speculates about the kind of room within Edith's person, Eeldrop imagines her placed within a room. The expression “waking to a room” (emphasis added) slightly alters the expected prepositional locution of “waking in a room.” As Eeldrop phrases it, Edith wakes to her setting, as if, say, waking to remorse. The specific moment of regaining consciousness is temporally afloat, as if part of Eeldrop's test is to imagine the act of waking in order to speculate when, and how, a person and the world may come together, but also to show the difficulty of locating any such finite place or time when a sharp distinction might be drawn between a person and the world. Edith wakes to a setting which is itself a threshold in the double aspect of the sunlight beating in and being kept out: the broken blinds recall the shaded peripheries between figures, rooms and worlds in Eliot's “Preludes,” where the “showers beat / On broken blinds,” and where “the world came back / And the light crept up between the shutters” (CPP 22, 23).

“Rooms,” “scenes,” “atmospheres,” “situations” – these words repeatedly play a part in Eliot's early poems and critical prose: “the contact and cross-contact of souls, the breath and scent of the room” (CP1 488).

The spread of the English language as a consequence of imperialism and English's popularity as a lingua franca in the age of globalization have significantly broadened the range and timbre of short stories written in English. This chapter examines ways in which the short story has been refashioned by Anglophone postcolonial writers, with a particular focus on how the incorporation of oral elements has reinvigorated the genre. In African and Asian societies that were subjected to British colonization, the transformations that the short story has undergone have been particularly influenced by traditional tale-telling modes. In the Anglophone Caribbean, where the majority populations are Afro-Caribbean descendants of slaves and Indo-Caribbean descendants of indentured labourers, the lines of cultural continuity have been more fractured, but there has also been an uneasy, yet highly productive dialogue between the conventions of the English short story and the oral traditions of local communities. The genocide of the pre-Columbian indigenous peoples of the region left few survivors to bring their narrative traditions into print, but the fiction of Guyanese-born writers Wilson Harris and Pauline Melville has brought aspects of their legends into the short story. Elsewhere in the Americas and in Australasia, despite suffering violence and dispossession at the hands of settler populations, indigenous voices have survived to articulate the experiences of their communities in short fiction.

The vast range of themes and forms to be found in African short stories makes it difficult to generalize about ways in which writers across the continent have employed the genre, but some commonalities exist. In pre-colonial sub-Saharan African societies, tale-telling was a lynch-pin of cultural continuity, serving as a vehicle for imparting ethical instruction as well as a medium of entertainment, and the griot, or storyteller, occupied a revered role in communities, acting as the oral repository of their collective wisdom. Postcolonial African writers have sometimes seen themselves as the linear descendants of griots, charged with a similar responsibility to educate the recipients of their work, while also entertaining them through the power of story. However, as Helon Habila points out, ‘It's a sad but apparently undeniable fact that the short story has always taken second place to the novel in Africa.’

The literary term ‘epiphany’, in its original inception in James Joyce's draft-novel Stephen Hero (c.1901–6), has become synonymous in critical accounts of modernism with the moment of transcendent insight, intensity of experience or revelation. In a literary movement in which a prevalent aesthetic aim was the representation of a reality beyond appearances and below material surfaces, the significant moment came to epitomize the endeavour to capture, however fleetingly, the ‘truth’ of subjective experience. It is noteworthy, however, that the version of Joyce's novel published in 1916 as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man drops any overt reference to the epiphany, and its depiction is frequently problematized by elliptical, fragmented language. The revelatory moment, this chapter will claim, may thus be interpreted in terms of tension and contradiction as opposed to conveying a transcendent insight.

Whilst the epiphany first receives its name in Stephen Hero, it was to become a structural and aesthetic marker of modernism in general and of the short story form in particular. The moment of epiphany around which modernist short stories have traditionally been seen to pivot is closely associated with the oblique, experimental narrative styles that were distinct from the rich, descriptive canvas of Victorian realism. As modernist writers began to privilege impressionistic, ambiguous depictions of subjective consciousness over the didacticism, materialism and omniscient narration of literary realism, the breakdown of the serialized Victorian novel was superseded by an increased dissemination of short fiction through the literary magazines in which it was frequently published. The emergence of new periodicals such as The Yellow Book, The New Age, The Savoy and The Dome promoted the short story form, as well as various modernist movements, by publishing the work of authors whose work they viewed as avant-garde and experimental. The New Age, for instance, published the work of H. G. Wells and G. B. Shaw, as well as several examples of Katherine Mansfield's early work. It also had feminist affiliations with magazines such as The Freewoman (1911–12), The New Freewoman (1913) and The Egoist (1914–19), which later superseded The Freewoman and was presided over by Rebecca West and later Ezra Pound.

This epigraph is not by T. S. Eliot, nor is it something he could have written. Nor, for all the imaginative brilliance of his work in both forms, criticism and poetry, is it a phrase we would be likely to encounter about Eliot. It is instead the epigraph to J. E. Spingarn's Creative Criticism, which Eliot reviewed for the TLS in 1926. Eliot, whose critical eye was often drawn to fragmentary forms such as epigraphs, quotes these words, enjoying the borrowed flight of whimsy, but then adds a stern coda. Spingarn's criticism, he writes, undeniably does have “wings”; alas, “like the fabulous bird of paradise, it has wings but no feet, and can never settle” (CP2 805). Literary criticism, for Eliot, might launch, then soar. Nonetheless, it should have firm foundations: tradition, order, precision, and criteria. In the year of this review, Eliot had just emerged from the pseudonym, Crites, champion of the ancients, under which he had written his regular editorial “Commentaries” for the Criterion. Spingarn's fancifulness earns him a place in the ranks of the “Imperfect Critics” that Eliot began to assemble from his earliest ventures into literary judgment, granting this title to the second chapter of The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1920). His first chapter in this book addresses the more singular (perhaps, by implication, near-mythical) case of “The Perfect Critic”: the quest both to delineate and to become this figure gives form to Eliot's prose.

To begin with unattributed words that do not belong to their apparent subject – in fact, that illustrate something that their subject would not have said – was one of the most characteristic tactics of Eliot's own criticism. Lecturing on Matthew Arnold, for example, in the series The Use of Poetry and The Use of Criticism (1933), Eliot opens with a long quotation from an authoritative nineteenth-century voice, urging “a new discipline of suffering to fit men for the new conditions.” Arnold's vision for civilization, the audience might presume, only to be told: “these words are not only not Arnold's, but we know at once that they could not have been written by him” (CP4 654, italics added).

While Walter Allen labels Walter Scott's ‘The Two Drovers’, from Chronicles of the Canongate (1827), the ‘first modern English short story’, Scott's texts emerged in an Edinburgh print culture in which the short story was rapidly achieving prominence as a literary form. The founding of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in 1817 was crucial not only for the development of the terror tale, but also for regional fiction, often explicitly connected to oral traditions. The short fiction published in Blackwood's frequently combined correspondence, journalism, historical enquiry and narrative; Scott's description of his Tales of My Landlord series as a collection of ‘Tales, illustrative of ancient Scottish manners, and of the Traditions of their Respective Districts’ could also serve for much of the fiction published in the magazine. Blackwood's was one of the first periodicals to pay writers of fiction at the same rate as its essayists and reviewers, and by 1820 fiction made up roughly one-fifth of its annual contents. William Blackwood published tales by writers such as Thomas De Quincy, John Wilson and William Maginn, as well as Scott himself. Most influentially for the development of the short story in Scotland, Blackwood also published tales and serialized novels by James Hogg and John Galt. Many of these writers used Blackwood's and its competitor journals as places to experiment with genre, often drawing explicitly on nonfiction published alongside their tales, as well as taking advantage of the magazine's reputation for self-reflexive commentary on authorial identity and narrative form.

Hogg's four collections of tales focused on the Scottish Borders and Galt's series of ‘Tales of the West’ set in Ayrshire and Glasgow, many of which were in part serialized in Blackwood's, use a miscellany form to present a series of first-person fictional memoirs with a specific regional identity. Their texts explore the interconnections of fiction and nonfiction, as well as poetry and prose in the case of Hogg, and highlight the relation between reportage and storytelling. Hogg frequently exploits his dual position as a representative of unlettered, rural identity in his guise as ‘The Ettrick Shepherd’ in the magazine's series of satirical sketches Noctes Ambrosianae and as a member of Edinburgh's literary establishment: Hogg is presented as an authentic countryman who has infiltrated the urban intellectual sphere.

In his preface to the 1994 Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot, A. David Moody remarked: “For a time after his death in 1965 Eliot himself seemed in danger of becoming simply another monument, frozen in a fixed idea of his achievement. But there is too much life in his work for the accepted idea to contain it; and a new generation of readers, coming to it in the frame of mind of this end of century, are finding that there is much in it which answers to current preoccupations.” Over the succeeding twenty years, major developments have transformed the landscape of our current preoccupations in Eliot studies, leading one Eliot scholar to claim: “Critical work on T. S. Eliot has undergone a renaissance since the early 1990s, bringing new ideas and methods to bear on a much-studied writer whose depths, by then, were long supposed to have been plumbed.” As Gail McDonald observes in her contribution to this volume, the dynamic and controversial subject of Eliot's engagement with gender and sexuality was not treated in the 1994 volume. Furthermore, with the release of a mass of hitherto restricted archive material into the public domain, new generations of readers are asking their own questions of T. S. Eliot. Since 2009, six volumes of The Letters of T. S. Eliot have been published and four volumes of The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, taking us up to 1933. A two-volume Faber edition of The Poems of T. S. Eliot, building on the principles established in the 1996 edition of Eliot's early notebook, Inventions of the March Hare, will provide an authoritative text for new readers. These authorised, fully annotated new editions must undoubtedly re-inflect ongoing debates about this complex and challenging poet-critic. Moody's collection was sensitively and intelligently constructed as a gateway for Eliot's readers in 1994, but given the seismic upheaval in Eliot scholarship and criticism since then, it is time for a revised Companion to address the needs of a twenty-first century audience.

Readers know when they are reading a book of short stories that is more than a miscellaneous collection yet clearly not a novel: James Joyce's Dubliners (1914) is not only different from a collection of stories such as Ian McEwan's First Love, Last Rites (1975) but also obviously different from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). The stories in books such as Dubliners both stand on their own and gather accretively to form more meaningful communities of fictions that, in turn, enlarge the meanings of each individual story. As such, the short story cycle is a middle-way genre, and its growing popularity may be accounted for in its suitability for the increasingly distracted reader's preference for brevity and the human need for continuity in aid of greater understanding. Coherence in such books of related independent stories can be achieved weakly by means of a frame narrative, a similar theme, a distinctive style, or a compositional device (such as structuring the whole on a musical or painterly subject), or achieved strongly by means of shared setting (Dubliners), focus on one character (Alice Munro's 1978 Who Do You Think You Are?), or recurrent characters and narrators (Kate Atkinson's 2002 Not the End of the World). These kinds of books the present chapter calls short story cycles, while recognizing that a number of other descriptors – series, sequence, novel in stories, composite, etc. – continue to compete for acceptance in critical-theoretical discussions of this comparatively new fictional form.

The determination of inclusion in the genre category of short story cycle depends on precision or looseness of definition. Complicating matters, many books published as novels – by publishers wary of the paying public's resistance to any title that includes ‘short story’ – are actually short story cycles (or sequences, composites, etc.). (Exceptionally, Faber and Faber advertised Kazuo Ishiguro's sombre Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall (2009) as a ‘short story cycle’.) In addressing the question of definitional precision/imprecision, this chapter maintains a more precise understanding of what constitutes a short story cycle; nevertheless, as wide a reference as possible will be made throughout to various books of short fictions that, if not precisely story cycles, are also clearly not miscellaneous collections or novels.

The previous Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot, first published in 1994, contained no essay on the subject of Eliot and gender, and had only one page reference to gender in its index: “gender, rendering of.” There were eleven references to sexuality, three of which appeared under the subheading “insecurity of.” Ten years ago, a substantial volume written by distinguished scholars did not dwell upon the significance of gender and sexuality to Eliot's work. An earlier publication, Mildred Martin's A Half-Century of Eliot Criticism (1972), a thorough annotated bibliography of English-language books and articles for the 1916–65 period (2,692 items), makes it clear that the controversies in Eliot studies in the first half of the twentieth century were far more likely to center on the poet's putative obscurity, his religious conversion, and his conservative politics than on his attitudes toward women or sexuality. “Politics,” at that point, had barely begun to be associated with feminist theory: the politics of gender and identity were still in the making. My first task, then, is to justify the inclusion of an essay on this topic now.

Although the configurations, definitions, and theories of gender and sexuality are unsettled and the contours of the fields variable, it is now nearly impossible to imagine studies of modernism and its major writers without these categories of investigation. To neglect them is to ignore several decades of significant developments in literary criticism generally and modernist studies particularly: influential work recovering and revaluing modernist women writers, critical examination of gender representation in literary works, analyses of style through the lens of sexuality, and investigations of gender and sexuality in the cultures of modernity and modernism. Surveying the development of criticism over the last half-century, one need not be a fashion-monger to recognize that poststructuralism, feminist studies, cultural studies, and gender and queer studies have had a transformative effect on the way we now read. New Modernist Studies, announced in the Chronicle of Higher Education in 1999 and institutionalized in the now well-established Modernist Studies Association, would have been unthinkable without the significant shifts in critical perspective brought about by these new modes of analysis.

In his pioneering survey, New Maps of Hell (1960), Kingsley Amis observed that science fiction (sf) is preoccupied with ‘the idea as hero’ rather than subtle uses of language, narrative or characterization. Martin Scofield subsequently adapted Amis's definition of sf to his analysis of the American short story ‘in which the overall idea, rather than character, plot or “themes” in the usual sense, dominates the conception of the work and gives it its unity or deliberate disunity’. Unlike Amis, who tended to prefer his sf to be either escapist adventures or satirical exercises, Scofield's adaptation allows him to define the short story in self-reflexive terms: ‘a work that is dominated by a single guiding idea or mood and achieves a perceptible overall artistic coherence’ (p. 5). Symptomatic of the taxonomic problems that underwrite both sf- and short story criticism, ‘the idea as hero’ can paradoxically refer to a story that is thematic and plot-driven, atmospheric and impressionistic. Not only does the short story lie at the intersection between high and low culture, between the little magazine and the mass-market periodical, as Tim Armstrong has observed, but so too does science fiction. As Farah Mendlesohn has argued, ‘whatever else it is, sf literature is not popular’; it exists ‘at variance from the standards and demands of both the literary establishment and the mass market’. Sf and the short story complement each other not only formally but also culturally: their liminal position questions the assumptions by which critics have often discriminated between what is or is not literary. Yet, as Nicola Humble has noted, ‘there is something wrong with the way in which we have mapped the literary field of the first half of the twentieth century’. This ‘something wrong’ is accentuated when we attempt to re-map not only the short story but also sf as part of literary production since the 1890s.

The Scientific Romance

The genealogy of science fiction is a notoriously tangled family tree. Critics have variously traced its origins to ancient and classical texts, such as The Epic of Gilgamesh and Lucian's ‘A True History’; to the intellectual and religious convulsions between Protestantism and Catholicism in the seventeenth century; and to the impact of the Industrial Revolution upon Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818).

The writers discussed in this chapter form a unique group in the history of modern British fiction. Most were born during the rise of high modernism and came to maturity during its flourishing decade, the 1920s, yet, with a few exceptions, they have seldom been included in discussions of modernism, or in considerations of the ‘Auden generation’. If anything, they might be called second generation modernists, for their stories – influenced by the stark realism of Maupassant, the open-ended poetics of Chekhov and the sexual politics of D. H. Lawrence – often seemed unconventional to magazine editors and contemporary readers. Nevertheless, they embodied in many ways the fears of some high modernists, springing as they did from the lower middle classes, educated not in public schools and universities but in the newly created grammar schools, earning their living by their pens. Except for Lawrence and Graham Greene, the writers discussed here were not intellectuals; they had no overriding theories of politics, economics and sociology, though inevitably their stories touch on these issues. With a few exceptions, they resembled E. M. Forster's Leonard Bast – struggling to move upwards culturally by locating themselves between the extremes of popular genres (mystery, adventure and romance) and the experiments of The Yellow Book, Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway.

As most of these writers came to maturity between the World Wars, they reacted to the mass murder of the First World War by focusing on the individual, but, unlike the modernists, they found much of their inspiration among the people of the small towns and farms outside London. Jed Esty argues that the ‘metropolitan modernists’ (T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Forster) turned away from internationalism, fragmentation and the city in the 1930s to focus on an inward-looking, non-imperial England. Following Esty's lead, we might postulate that the writers discussed here also focused inwardly on individuals at the margins of society, as Frank O'Connor's theory of the story claims. Like the modernists, they often delved into their characters’ internal lives and found complex, unstable characters, but the traditional omniscient or first person, or occasionally the free-indirect, points of view – not stream of consciousness – were the staples of their narrative repertoire.