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Short Stories: ‘How Loud the Birds’
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- By Ailsa Cox
- Edited by Gerri Kimber, University of Northampton, Todd Martin, Huntington University, Indiana
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- Book:
- Katherine Mansfield and <i>The Garden Party and Other Stories</i>
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 03 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 October 2022, pp 143-152
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Summary
‘“How loud the birds are,” said Linda in her dream.’
– Katherine Mansfield, ‘Prelude’First thing in the morning. Sea fades into a dove-coloured sky, wind turbines churn half-visible on the horizon. Oyster shells, fathoms deep, discarded a hundred years ago, two hundred – broken crocks and house bricks, rounded into egg-shapes by the tide. On the shoreline, crushed shells and polished sea glass, the greenish shade of jellyfish. A rope filthy with weeds, driftwood the size of a human torso. A yellow jeep makes its way towards a pale boulder that turns out to be the massive corpse of a seal, half-buried in a sand pit of its own making.
Inland, the roads are deserted, the pavements free of rubbish. McDonald’s closed, the nail bars and the hairdressers shuttered – and the carpet shop and the dentist on the corner. The gulls have moved on, the only sound the songbirds now, or if you come in closer, you can hear Lindsay breathing as she runs down the middle of the road, running, running, running in sweatpants, elbows scissoring, ponytail bobbing, zipping along with a spring in her step. It’s happening, she can feel it, something changing deep inside.
At Number 23, the kitchen’s fragrant with the scent of new-baked bread, and not the fake smell either, like they pump out in supermarkets. This is real, an achievement. Steve takes a picture of his first successful loaf looking splendid on the breadboard – splendid, that’s a word you don’t hear often, one he stashes in his mind for later.
‘Ten more minutes!’
Sweeping Max’s stuff to one side – felt pens, scribbled paper, railway timetables, Mario figures, Steve lays the table for three. Knives lined up by the side of matching plates – cereal for Max. He searches the top cupboard for a milk jug, and the glass butter dish. Butter. Good for you, no matter what they say. Forgot to write his dream down this morning. Cows in a field. Covered in flies. And some one said, look, just look, who was it that said just look, see there . … ?
4 - Writers on the Short Story: 1950–present
- from Part I - Historicising the Short Story
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- By Ailsa Cox, Professor of Short Fiction at Edge Hill University
- Edited by Paul Delaney, Adrian Hunter
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- Book:
- The Edinburgh Companion to the Short Story in English
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 18 December 2019
- Print publication:
- 31 October 2018, pp 56-72
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Summary
LOOKING BACK NOSTALGICALLY on his early career, John Updike recalled a time when ‘a young family that by 1960 included four children under six’ could support a modest existence on the basis of short stories accepted by The New Yorker. The New Yorker still pays handsomely, but it is one of the last remnants of the magazine culture that, as so many commentators have observed, sustained the careers of short story writers in the first half of the twentieth century. Such figures included V. S. Pritchett, who, in later life, proclaimed the short story ‘one of the inextinguishable lost causes’:
The periodicals on which the writer can rely have almost all vanished, driven out by expensive printing, by television and the hundred and one new diversions of an extravert and leisured society. Yet the annual number of volumes published is said to have increased and if the public is painfully small, it is also addicted.
Pritchett's article, ‘The Short Story’, published in the small-circulation London Magazine, encapsulates the enduring relationship between economic vulnerability and status anxiety exhibited by short story writers in their comments on the form. From the post-war period to the present day, pronouncements about the death of the novel, the undermining of literary culture, or its atrophy, are not uncommon. The threat posed by television, in Pritchett's article, multiplies, and is finally dwarfed by the ubiquity of social media. But short story writing is conditioned by its marginality to a far greater degree than other literary genres. As Paul March-Russell notes, a dependence on magazine publication also generates a sense of the text's ephemerality, no matter how healthy the circulation figures.
Pritchett's ‘inextinguishable lost cause’ suggests a quixotic attachment to failure which, in some writers, becomes an aesthetic strategy, as they appropriate the notion of the incomplete or the inexpressible. A self-consciousness about the choice of form perpetuates a constant re-examination of its attributes, usually in contrast with the novel, and a need to identify a canonical tradition as a context for the writer's own practice. These tendencies are all evident in Pritchett's 1966 article, and recur in the critical writings of his successors, published sometimes in essays and newspaper articles, and often in the introductions to anthologies. Pritchett and his contemporary, Frank O'Connor begin a conversation that continues up until this day, as practitioners negotiate a role for the short story in contemporary culture.
6 - “The Emptiness in Place of Her”: Space, Absence, and Memory in Alice Munro's Dear Life
- from Part I - Conceptualizing Space and Place: Houses, Landscapes, Territory
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- By Ailsa Cox, professor of Short Fiction at Edge Hill University, UK.
- Edited by Lorre-Johnston Christine, Rao Eleonora
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- Book:
- Space and Place in Alice Munro's Fiction
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 15 August 2018
- Print publication:
- 22 May 2018, pp 119-132
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Summary
ALICE MUNRO's 2012 COLLECTION, Dear Life, revisits many places familiar from her previous work—mapping both domestic space and the semi-rural landscapes of small town Canada. “In Sight of the Lake,” “Amundsen,” and “Gravel” return to the key image of the lake, while other stories (“To Reach Japan,” “Train”) echo her use of the transitional space of the train in “Wild Swans” (Who Do You Think You Are? / The Beggar Maid, 1978) and “Chance” (Runaway, 2004). Munro territory is by its nature ambiguous and multidimensional. But these later stories are especially marked by silence and absence, evoked by wintry landscapes, empty streets; or the fractured narrative viewpoint associated with memory loss or repression. Munro has declared Dear Life to be her final collection; it is a book that summarizes her career in many ways and, with the autobiographical sequence, “Finale,” closes with a statement of its origins in personal experience.
Bakhtin's well-known concept of the chronotope, the configuration of space and time that characterizes a specific text or genre, both symbolically and structurally, helps us to understand the resonance of landscape and architecture in these stories. Munro uses her characters’ perception of external space to map subjective experience, often locating her characters very precisely in relation to their immediate environment in order to register that which is not seen or not understood or placed at the periphery of the conscious mind. In this chapter I shall focus on the relationship between space, absence, and memory in two stories—“Train” and “Gravel”—the former an example of third-person narration and free indirect discourse, while the latter mimics autobiographical discourse through first-person narration.
Train
“Train,” the story of a drifter in rural Ontario, is a reminder of Munro's debt to Southern Gothic writers, so evident in her first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968). The relationship between the protagonist, Jackson, and Belle, the isolated spinster whose farm he takes over, is especially reminiscent of Flannery O'Connor.
34 - The Institution of Creative Writing
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- By Ailsa Cox, Edge Hill University
- Edited by Dominic Head, University of Nottingham
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- Book:
- The Cambridge History of the English Short Story
- Published online:
- 17 November 2016
- Print publication:
- 14 November 2016, pp 581-597
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Summary
The discipline of creative writing began to emerge strongly in US institutions in the middle of the twentieth century, although it had already begun to establish itself before the Second World War: the pioneering Iowa Writers’ Workshop was founded as early as 1936 (and creative writing had been taught at Iowa for many years before that). In the United States, the relationship between the teaching of creative writing in Higher Education and literary production has been notable in the period since 1945. There was a significant expansion of Master of Fine Arts (MFA) programmes in the 1980s and 1990s, with far-reaching consequences for literary culture. In Britain, the first MA programmes were founded by mavericks in the 1970s: Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson at the University of East Anglia, and the poet David Craig at Lancaster. It took a generation for creative writing to establish itself in British universities: initially, such courses were considered eccentric, a flashy American import. Yet, since then, the growth has been dramatic: by 2015 the National Association of Writers in Education (NAWE) calculated that there were over two hundred MA courses available, with at least fifty universities also offering PhD supervision. Current undergraduate provision varies from option modules within an English degree to full-blown joint- and single-honours courses. While some individuals remain sceptical about the discipline's academic credentials, most universities have embraced creative writing, if only because of its attractiveness to students.
Those short story writers who do not have some kind of university affiliation, as graduates, teachers or honorary professors, would seem to be in a minority. Even fewer are without some experience of the creative writing workshop, either in Higher Education or some other context, for instance the residential courses run by the Arvon Foundation. Mark McGurl, in his influential study of 2009, argues that the involvement of so many American writers in creative writing programmes has produced a marked self-consciousness and reflexivity in their work. This chapter is necessarily more speculative and inconclusive than McGurl's, but it will follow his lead in suggesting that the partnership between short story writers and the academy has left its traces on the genre.