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 is fi led 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. Hawthorn’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. 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 fi rm sense of architectural form. They added a startling

psychological depth to the development of character, employing a treatment of

aberrational psychology in ways that transformed the Gothic mode into an enduring

part of the American short story tradition.

They also expanded the range of subject to short story treatment by introducing new

forms and genres. 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.

Hawthorne, his famous story, “Young Goodman Brown”, 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. Y et, in his own time,

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 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 the

creation of stories expressly designed for children. The skilful refashioning of Greek

A Wonder - Book for Girls and Boys Tanglewood Tales.

myths for children in and He also

produced a series of historical stories for children, The Whole History of Grandfather’s

Chair. 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. In

some of these tales. the inability of an individual to come to terms with a double or

some figure that represents an aspect of the narrator’s own personality. he brought a

unity of tone, mood, and atmosphere to the development of American fiction. Although

his critical writings emphasize the single effect to which everything in a short work

must lead, he also recognized that strong writing would have what he (and his times)

called “suggestiveness”, a broad term implying that great works of art carry with them

multiple layers of meanings that invite thought and analysis. In short, his works lend

themselves to symbolic interpretation on multiple levels. The romantic tale,

particularly as mastered by Hawthorne and Poe, heavily favors the use of symbolic

language, but has very little interest in the accurate rendition of normal human

speech. it is important to distinguish between the romantic tale and the realistic short

story. Although some writers and critics use the terms “tale” and “story”

indiscriminately.

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 fi nest, 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 who are

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 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 of 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, “he 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 most

daring treatment of the devices of the romantic tale by an American woman writer.

Important new markets for American short stories appeared in the middle of the

Atlantic Monthly,

nineteenth century, most notably the advent in 1857 of the which

Harper’s Magazine,

included three stories in each of its early issues which had been

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&rsqu