Riassunto esame Letteratura anglo-americana, Prof. Pitozzi Andrea, libro consigliato A companion to the american short story, Alfred Bendixen, James Nagel

American publishing in the early nineteenth century

American publishing in the early nineteenth century is filled with failed attempts to establish significant literary magazines. Book publishers were generally reluctant to produce collections of stories. Both Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne attempted to launch their literary careers with collections of short stories but had great difficulty in finding publishers for their first projected books. Hawthorne's careful plans for his first volumes were discarded, and the individual stories were simply lifted out. One of the gifts-books that publishers discovered they could sell annually. The gift-books provided one of the few outlets available to writers of short stories, but they paid poorly and usually published anonymously, which meant that they also added little to a young writer’s reputation.

The contributions of Hawthorne and Poe

If Irving merits credit as the inventor of the American story, then Hawthorne and Poe surely deserve praise for solidifying its status as a work of art. They grounded the short story more firmly in a clear commitment to narrative structure and plot, replacing Irving’s genial rambling and lengthy descriptions with a firm sense of architectural form. They added a startling psychological depth to the development of character, employing a treatment of aberrational psychology that transformed the Gothic mode into an enduring part of the American short story tradition. They also expanded the range of subjects to short story treatment by introducing new forms and genres.

Hawthorne's impact

As a short story writer, Hawthorne’s current reputation rests almost entirely on the great historical tales of the New England Puritans that he produced in the 1830s, but these represent only a relatively small part of his work in short fiction. In his famous story, “Young Goodman Brown”, Hawthorne begins with a young man leaving his wife to go into the forest. Yet, by the time Brown wakes up from the nightmare he has experienced in the moral wilderness that he has entered, Hawthorne has taken us into a symbolic realm that challenges almost all the conventional boundaries: we have been moved from the world of historical fact into a psychological landscape filled with surrealistic imagery that compels us to question the most fundamental issues of both ontology and epistemology.

Hawthorne was best known and most widely praised as the writer of genial sketches and gentle allegories. He was a writer who experimented with a wide variety of forms and themes throughout his career. He always maintained an interest in the fictional possibilities and even considered creating a series of parables to be called “Allegories of the Heart.” In the 1840s, Hawthorne also helped to create the genre now known as science fiction. He produced stories about the end of the world, such as “The New Adam and Eve” and “Earth’s Holocaust,” and a number of tales focusing on scientists who end up destroying those they love, most notably “The Birth-mark” and “Rappaccini’s Daughter.”

Hawthorne was also one of the first major American authors to devote himself to creating stories expressly designed for children. The skillful refashioning of Greek myths for children in A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys and Tanglewood Tales. He also produced a series of historical stories for children, The Whole History of Grandfather’s Chair.

Poe's literary legacy

The only writer who did as much to make the American romantic tale into a significant literary achievement was Edgar Allan Poe, who began by writing satires and hoaxes and ended up transforming the tale of terror into a serious literary form and inventing the detective story. In his critical writings, Poe emphasized the importance of a single effect to which every element of the short story must contribute. He also continually affirmed the artistic superiority of works that were long enough for full development and short enough to be read in a single sitting. Poe was the master of a wide range of fictional forms. He also created some of our earliest stories of science fiction with “The Balloon-Hoax” (1844) and “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (1845).

The diversity of Poe’s achievement is perhaps best represented by his ability to both invent the detective story, and the capacity of the rational mind to detect the perpetrators of crime and reestablish justice and order, and also become the great acknowledged master of the horror tale, which seems to rely on opposing values, on a fascination with the irrational and the aberrational, with cruelty and pain and suffering, and with bizarre acts of violent revenge. The best of the works that he called his “tales of ratiocination” – “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), “The Gold Bug” (1843), and “The Purloined Letter” (1845) – established most of the conventions on which detective fiction still rests, including the narrative strategies for presenting an extraordinarily penetrating mind which is able to perceive and finally explain the truth that lies hidden within a great mystery that puzzles everyone else.

Poe’s horror tales often seem founded on acts of senseless violence which almost always turn out to be self-destructive. In “The Black Cat”, the narrator blames his own actions on the “spirit of PERVERSENESS”, which he insists is “one of the primitive impulses of the human heart” and describes as “an unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself.”

The source of terror in Poe’s greatest stories stems from the inability of their narrators to understand the worlds they inhabit and the reasons for their own actions. In these tales, it is the failure to understand the self that leads to acts of mutilation that divide the physical body and shatter the spiritual nature, or to characters being buried alive, which presents an almost perfect metaphor for the psychological idea of repression.

Melville and other contributors

Melville’s experiments with short fiction did not attract much attention in his own time, but twentieth-century scholars established him as one of our finest, most subtle masters of short fiction. Of his short works, the most romantic in tone and texture is certainly “Benito Cereno,” with its portrayal of violent adventure and unending mystery, its heightened contrast of characters appearing to represent American innocence and European corruption, and its insistence on probing the issues of slavery and racism from multiple perspectives.

On the other hand, Melville’s most studied story, “Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street,” appears to be moving towards a kind of realism in its critique of the deadening effects of meaningless labor in a commercial society. “Bartleby” focuses on both its purported subject, a copyist who engages in a passive-aggressive rejection of trivial and debasing work, and its very unreliable narrator, a genial man in flight from any confrontation with the reality he has helped to create. Both narrator and protagonist are isolated individuals marked by a failure of vision in a narrative filled with symbolism emphasizing the blank walls.

The story is complex and even devious. This devious complexity is clearest in the stunning sexual comedy that underlies some of Melville’s other short stories, perhaps most notably “Cock a Doodle Doo!” and “The Apple-Tree Table.”

The romantic tale's evolution

The romantic tale continued to attract talented adherents, most notably Fitz-James O’Brien and Harriet Prescott Spofford. O’Brien’s best tales remain surprisingly neglected by contemporary critics. His famous ghost story, “What Was It?”, is about the threat posed by an invisible man in the bedroom. “The Diamond Lens,” his best work of science fiction, focuses on a man unable to grasp the world. His finest work of fiction, “The Lost Room,” depicts a man who loses his place in the world, or more precisely, discovers that his room has disappeared after he has been told by a strange being that he lives in a “queer” house. O’Brien’s best stories are built on anxieties and issues that would have a special resonance for homosexuals in a repressive society.

Harriet Prescott Spofford brought a feminine and feminist decision to the romantic tale with her best works of short fiction. She first gained attention with the publication of “In the Cellar,” a detailed story of Parisian intrigue and one of our first important detective stories by an American woman. “Circumstance,” her tale of a pioneer woman who keeps a menacing panther at bay by singing songs throughout a long night. Her long and difficult masterpiece, “The Amber Gods” (1860), offers one of the most remarkable and luxuriantly poetic monologues in American fiction and features a heroine whose self-indulgence seems to transcend even death. Her finest work is probably “Her Story,” which provides a treatment of madness and marriage that prefigures Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Her early work represents the final flourish of New England romanticism and provides the most significant and daring treatment of the devices of the romantic tale by an American woman writer.

The development of American short story markets

Important new markets for American short stories appeared in the middle of the nineteenth century, most notably with the advent in 1857 of the Atlantic Monthly, which included three stories in each of its early issues. Harper’s Magazine, established in 1850, abandoned its initial practice of publishing mostly reprints of British material and began soliciting American writers. Unfortunately, book publishers continued to believe that collections of short stories were unmarketable, and a writer needed to earn a substantial reputation before publishers would risk bringing out a volume of short fiction. That changed in the 1880s, when Scribner’s