U N I T 3 THE SHORT STORY This Unit deals with the short story, a fictional work of prose that is shorter in length than a novel. Only some of the many authors who experimented with this genre will be mentioned. A. A GENERAL OVERVIEW The origin of short stories dates back to the oral traditions that produced tales such as the Iliad and the Odyssey. Through the ages, stories were told in the form of fables, folk tales, parables. Giovanni Boccaccio s Decameron and Geoffrey Chaucer s Canterbury Tales were collections of short stories and marked the passage from the oral to the written tradition. As an independent literary genre, the short story appeared in the USA at the beginning of the 19th century, whereas in Great Britain it developed much later. In the second half of the 19th century there was N. Hawthorne a great demand for short stories to be published in magazines and journals. This demand increased until the middle of the 20th century but from that moment on it declined. Nowadays there is very little demand for them, even though literary magazines, online magazines and The New Yorker Magazine still publish them. The form and the characteristics of short stories, of C. Baudelaire G. Chaucer course, depend on their author and on the period in which they were written. Besides, they may belong to different genres, such as classical, psychological, symbolic, detective, horror, and so on. In addition, those published in magazines may be different from those published in collections. Magazine short stories, for example, usually have a well-planned plot, carefully described characters and a surprise ending, characteristics that may not be present in other types of short stories. Both short stories and novels are fictional prose. What distinguishes one from A. Christie the other, then? First of all, their length. As Edgar Allan Poe maintained in his essay The Philosophy of Composition (1846), a short story should be read in one sitting. Nowadays, prose writing is considered a short story when it contains between 1,000 and 20,000 words. Secondly, short stories focus on a single plot (they have no side or minor plots), a single setting, and cover a short period of time. They also present A. Hitchcock few events and characters. G. Boccaccio 266