IN HIS LANDMARK STUDY OF Romantic short fiction, Tim Killick notes a tendency among scholars to read ‘backwards’ from Hawthorne and Poe, treating the decades prior to the 1840s as, at best, preparatory to the emergence of the short story as a modern literary form. The result, Killick argues, is a historical and geographical bias that neglects the polygenetic array of ‘innovative modes and sub-genres’ of shorter fiction flourishing on both sides of the Atlantic during the preceding half century. Much subsequent scholarship has taken Killick's cue, prising open the hitherto neglected history of Romantic-period short fiction. From Ian Duncan's account of short-form ‘nonnovelistic experimentation’ in the British miscellany, to Amanpal Garcha's exploration of the 1830s sketch as a radical form calibrated to the ‘newness, disconnection, and detachment’ of urban life, our understanding of the short story's beginnings has shifted backward in time, and outward in kind to embrace all manner of brief fictional texts.

Alongside this new historicist work has run a corresponding effort to overturn what Michael Collins identifies as the dominant nationalist-formalist paradigm in short story criticism. The persistence of that paradigm – which owes much to the writings of Charles E. May, Susan Lohafer and the so-called ‘new’ short story criticism of the 1980s and 1990s – has had the effect not only of distorting the historical record but of perpetuating a fundamentally Americentric view of the form. Collins's own solution is to reconfigure the early nineteenth-century short story as a phenomenon of transatlantic and transnational literary exchange. Timothy Clark goes further still, arguing for the abandonment of reading practices that inherently privilege ‘specific characteristics’ and ‘inherent properties’ conventionally associated with founding American practitioners of the short story. Clark singles out in this connection a critical over-reliance on visual analogies, ‘countervailing metaphors of sight, of the striving to “see” a text whole, the flash of revelation, etc’ – a conceptual apparatus that has its roots in Poe's ‘unity of impression’ and the notion of the short story as a ‘totality’ readily visualisable in the way the novel is not (‘a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction’, as Poe would have it). Thus do ‘accounts of the short story per se’ proceed on the assumption, Clark says, that the form is ‘fundamentally “American” in some sense’.

IN HER TREATISE ON THE CONDITION of contemporary literary criticism, The Limits of Critique, Rita Felski notes how, following ‘a long period of historically orientated scholarship, scholars of literature and art are returning to aesthetics, beauty, and form’. On the one hand, Felski says, this is to be welcomed, kicking as it does against contextual and sociological approaches that would treat writing as a ‘symptom, mirror, index, or antithesis of some larger social structure’. On the other hand, proponents of the New Aestheticism and New Formalism risk repeating errors of old, reverencing the text as timeless, transcendent and self-enclosed in ways that merely bracket the ‘problem of temporality’ without resolving it.

The dilemma Felski outlines here will be familiar to any scholar of the short story. Since its inception in the late nineteenth century, academic criticism has been marked by precisely the kind of ‘zigzagging between dichotomies of text versus context, word versus world’ Felski describes – between the attempt to construct an abstract, transhistorical definition of the form that would distinguish it categorically from the novel, and a countervailing desire to account for the short story's cultural-historical specificity, by aligning it with the development of a particular national literature, say, or with a specific conception of authorship. That the trend in recent years has been strongly in the latter direction is evident from a survey of recent titles: The Postcolonial Short Story, Irish Women Writers and the Modern Short Story, British Women Short Story Writers, The Short Story and the First World War, and Art and Commerce in the British Short Story – studies whose stress on history, materialism and identity is rooted, more or less explicitly, in a rejection of the kind of formalist and cognitivist approaches favoured by proponents of the so-called ‘new short story studies’ of the 1980s and 1990s: Susan Lohafer, John Gerlach, Charles E. May and others. Where for these earlier critics questions of formal and generic definition were central, today it is the cultural, historical and ideological functions of the short story that predominate.

Of course, such oscillations are ubiquitous across the field of literary studies, as Felski and other surveyors of the ‘postcritical’ future point out.

In a widely cited essay, Mary Louise Pratt argues that the relationship between the short story and the novel is not one of ‘contrasting equivalents’, but is ‘hierarchical’, ‘with the novel on top and the short story dependent’. Pratt offers both conceptual and historical justifications for this claim. The conceptual case is that ‘shortness cannot be an intrinsic property of anything, but occurs only relative to something else’. In other words, the short story is ‘short’ only by comparison to the novel. The historical argument is that the novel has prevailed because it is self-evidently ‘the more powerful and prestigious of the two genres’, with the short story functioning as a ‘training or practice ground for the apprentice novelist’. The attempts by theorists stretching back to Brander Matthews in the 1890s to identify the unique properties of the short form ought now, Pratt contends, to give way to a recognition of the ‘dependent (rather than interdependent) relation between short story and novel’.

Pratt's thesis would appear to be borne out in the careers of many twentieth-century writers for whom, as John Barth describes, a ‘pattern of working in the short story, building a reputation, and advancing to the novel’ has prevailed. What is more, the publishing industry has continued to treat the short story as a low-capital testing ground for talent that will find its full expression in longer work.