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The Great English Short-Story Writers, Volume 1 By: Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) |
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THE GREAT ENGLISH SHORT STORY WRITERS VOL. I WITH INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS BY WILLIAM J. DAWSON AND CONINGSBY W. DAWSON MCMX
ACKNOWLEDGMENT To the publishers and authors who have courteously permitted the use
of copyrighted material in these two volumes, a word of grateful
acknowledgment is hereby given by the editors.
CONTENTS CHAP.
I. THE EVOLUTION OF THE SHORT STORY II. THE APPARITION OF MRS. VEAL. By Daniel Defoe (1661 1731) III. THE MYSTERIOUS BRIDE. By James Hogg (1770 1835) IV. THE DEVIL AND TOM WALKER. By Washington Irving (1783 1859) V. DR. HEIDEGGER'S EXPERIMENT. By Nathaniel Hawthorne (1807 1864) VI. THE PURLOINED LETTER. By Edgar Allan Poe (1809 1849) VII. RAB AND HIS FRIENDS. By Dr. John Brown (1810 1882) VIII. THE BOOTS AT THE HOLLY TREE INN. By Charles Dickens (1812 1870) IX. A STORY OF SEVEN DEVILS. By Frank R. Stockton. (1834 1902) X. A DOG'S TALE. By Mark Twain (1835) XI. THE OUTCASTS OF POKER FLAT. By Bret Harte (1839 1902) XII. THE THREE STRANGERS. By Thomas Hardy (1840) XIII. JULIA BRIDE. By Henry James (1843) XIV. A LODGING FOR THE NIGHT. By Robert Louis Stevenson (1850 1894) INDEX
The Evolution of the Short Story
I The short story commenced its career as a verbal utterance, or, as
Robert Louis Stevenson puts it, with "the first men who told their
stories round the savage camp fire." It bears the mark of its origin, for even to day it is true that the
more it creates the illusion of the speaking voice, causing the reader
to listen and to see, so that he forgets the printed page, the better
does it accomplish its literary purpose. It is probably an instinctive
appreciation of this fact which has led so many latter day writers
to narrate their short stories in dialect. In a story which is
communicated by the living voice our attention is held primarily not
by the excellent deposition of adjectives and poise of style, but by
the striding progress of the plot; it is the plot, and action in the
plot, alone which we remember when the combination of words which
conveyed and made the story real to us has been lost to mind. "Crusoe
recoiling from the foot print, Achilles shouting over against the
Trojans, Ulysses bending the great bow, Christian running with his
fingers in his ears; these are each culminating moments, and each has
been printed on the mind's eye for ever."[1] [Footnote 1: A Gossip on Romance, from Memories and Portraits , by
R.L. Stevenson.] The secondary importance of the detailed language in which an incident
is narrated, when compared with the total impression made by the
naked action contained in the incident, is seen in the case of
ballad poetry, where a man may retain a vivid mental picture of the
localities, atmosphere, and dramatic moments created by Coleridge's
Ancient Mariner , or Rossetti's White Ship , and yet be quite
incapable of repeating two consecutive lines of the verse. In
literature of narration, whether prose or verse, the dramatic worth of
the action related must be the first consideration. In earlier days, when much of the current fiction was not written
down, but travelled from mouth to mouth, as it does in the Orient
to day, this fact must have been realized that, in the short story,
plot is superior to style. Among modern writers, however, there has
been a growing tendency to make up for scantiness of plot by
high literary workmanship; the result has been in reality not a
short story, but a descriptive sketch or vignette, dealing chiefly
with moods and landscapes. So much has this been the case that the
writer of a recent Practical Treatise on the Art of the Short Story
has found it necessary to make the bald statement that "the first
requisite of a short story is that the writer have a story to
tell."[2] [Footnote 2: Short Story Writing , by Charles Raymond Barrett.] However lacking the stories which have come down to us from ancient
times may be in technique, they invariably narrate action they have
something to tell... Continue reading book >>
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Literature |
Short stories |
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