We start with one of the longest short stories in the language: Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, which was described by one reviewer in 1899 as ‘the most hopelessly evil story we have ever read’. James’s powerful tale invites us to consider the short story’s roots in oral narrative and ghost story. It also stretches short out for 115 pages, forcing us to review and perhaps question the limits of the term. Does the shortness of a short story consist in its length, or in some other quality?
Our survey of a century of stories continues with pieces by Kipling and Orwell, who both make use of the compacted power of the form to communicate their complicated ambivalence about the political project of Empire with which they were personally engaged. As a representative of Modernism, Virginia Woolf, too, is closely identified with her time and place, but we will find that her stories aim for a very different effect on the reader. Katherine Mansfield is one of the twentieth century’s most accomplished short story writers; we will analyse the moments when characters come most clearly into focus, paying attention to what is left un-said as well as what is explicit.
Having started with the longest short story, we end the first week with some of the shortest; while The Turn of the Screw invited us to interrogate shortness, Ernest Hemingway’s In our time vignettes from 1924 force us to analyse what makes a story.
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