Explores the contradictory position of Arabic being both the official language and marginalized in Israel

This guide is an excellent beginning for the study of a little-recognized genre and will be needed by all academic libraries. Choice During the 1970s many distinguished writers began experimenting with the short story cycle, a literary form that achieved prominence in the early decades of the century through such works as James Joyce's Dubliners and Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. Despite the growing interest of both writers and readers, no theoretical work has been done on this genre in the past ten years. The Short Story Cycle provides a wide-ranging survey of the subject, offering detailed analyses of nine classic short story cycles and an annotated listing of over 120 others, many by contemporary authors. In addition, the introduction includes a history of the genre and its related forms as well as a discussion of conventions associated with the cycle. Short story cycles by Joyce, Anderson, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Welty, O'Connor, and Updike are described in individual chapters. These works illustrate the genre's diversity and vitality, ranging from cycles that are explicitly related through chronology, plot, and character to collections that reveal subtler, implicit unities. The author looks at the ways different writers use repeated or developed characters, themes, myth, imagery, setting, point of view, and plot or chronology to create the sense of a larger whole. Chapter bibliographies supply information on relevant critical writings as well as biographical and autobiographical materials. The volume concludes with an annotated listing of important twentieth-century short-story cycles by American, British, European, Canadian, Australian, Polish, Soviet, and Latin American writers.

Critics have been aware for years that such literary works as Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, William Faulkner's Go Down, Moses and James Joyce's Dubliners do not fit comfortably into established genres. By proposing the name composite novel and a supportive, comprehensive theory of genre for these works, Maggie Dunn and Ann Morris break new critical ground. In tracing the development of this literary genre in the 19th and 20th centuries throughout the world, the authors offer not only a new way to understand these classics, but also a useful approach to the best contemporary fiction such as N. Scott Momaday's The Way to Rainy Mountain and Laura Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate.

The first major collection of essays on the contemporary British short story cycle, this volume offers in-depth explorations of the genre by comparing its strategies for creating coherence with those of the novel and the short story collection, inquiring after the ties that bind individual short stories into a cycle. A section on theory approaches the form from the point of view of genre theory, cognitive literary studies, and book studies. It is followed by investigations of hitherto neglected aspects of the generic tradition of the British short story cycle and how they relate to the contemporary outlook of the form. Readings of individual contemporary cycles, illustrating the form’s multifaceted uses from the presentation of sexual identities to politics and trauma, make up the third and most substantial part of the volume, placing its focus squarely on the past decades. Unique in its combination of a focus on the literary traditions, politics and markets of the UK with a thorough examination of the genre’s manifold formal and thematic potentials, the volume explores what is at the heart of the short story cycle as a literary form: the constant negotiation between unity and separateness, collective and individual, of coherence and autonomy.

A COMPANION TO THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY A Companion to the American Short Story traces the development of this versatile literary genre over the past two centuries. Written by leading critics in the field, and edited by two major scholars, it explores a wide range of writers, from Edgar Allen Poe and Edith Wharton, at the end of the nineteenth century to important modern writers such as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Richard Wright. Contributions with a broader focus address groups of multiethnic, Asian, and Jewish writers. Each chapter places the short story into context, focusing on the interaction of cultural forces and aesthetic principles. The Companion takes account of cutting edge approaches to literary studies and contributes to the ongoing redefinition of the American canon, embracing genres such as ghost and detective fiction, cycles of interrelated short fiction, and comic, social and political stories. The volume also reflects the diverse communities that have adopted this literary form and made it their own, featuring entries on a variety of feminist and multicultural traditions. This volume presents an important new consideration of the role of the short story in the literary history of American literature.

Originally published in 1995, this book gathers together eleven full-length essays on important American short story sequences of the twentieth century. The introduction by J. Gerald Kennedy elucidates problems of defining the genre, cites notable instances of the form (such as Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio), and explores the implications of its modern emergence and popularity. Subsequent essays discuss illustrative works by such figures as Henry James, Jean Toomer, Ernest Hemingway, Richard Wright, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, J. D. Salinger, John Cheever, John Updike, Louise Erdrich, and Raymond Carver. While examining distinctive thematic concerns, each essay also considers implications of form and arrangement in the construction of composite fictions that often produce the illusion of a fictive community.

This book discusses the American short story composite, or short story cycle, a neglected form of writing consisting of autonomous stories interlocking into a whole. The critical work done on this genre has so far focused on the closural strategies of the composites, on how unity is accomplished in these texts. This study takes into consideration, to a greater degree than earlier criticism, the short story composite as an open work, emphasizing the tension between the independent stories and the unified work, between the discontinuity and fragmentation, on the one hand, and the totalizing strategies, on the other. The discussion of the genre is illustrated with references to numerous American short story composites.