A Short Note on Modern Short Story: 1000 Words+
A Short Note on Modern Short Story
Origin: The Short Story a comparatively recent development in English literature. As early as Chaucer there were short stories in verse, for his Canterbury Tales are stories put into the mouths of travelling pilgrims; but a proper prose medium was lacking in the English of the time, and although Chaucer's Parson's Tale and the Tale of Melibee are attempts at prose stories, they are of poor quality. In Italy, however, Chaucer's friend Boccaccio had written his own tales, contained in the Decameron, in prose, with much greater success.
Under Italian influence, prose romances continued to be translated and written in English during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but none of these can be claimed as direct ancestors of the modern short story.
In the 18th century, Steele and Addison evolved the tale-with-a-purpose to drive home a moral, but this again is different from the present-day tale of 'impression' or 'idea'. The stories produced in the later half of that century do not display any appreciable advance, and perhaps Scott's Wandering Willie's Tale, written in 1824, makes the first English approach to the modern type. The decisive step, however, was taken in America about 1830 by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe, who, both by precept and example, formulated the modern theory of Short Story writing.
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Each laid stress on a 'final impression' in the story, holding that plot alone was not enough. In a review of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales, Poe defined his principle as follows: "A skillful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents;.but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents, he then combines such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect.
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If his very initial sentence tend not to the upbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design. And by such means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction". Years later, in England, Robert Louis Stevenson's insistence on an initial impulse in the Short Story was strongly reminiscent of Poe.
"There are", he once remarked to his biographer, Graham Balfour, "three ways, and three ways only, of writing a story. You may take a plot and fit characters to it, or you may take a character and choose incidents and situations to develop. The plot is generally loose and ill-constructed. The main outline of the Victorian novel is the same. The story consists of a large variety of character and incident clustering round the figure of the hero.
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These characters and incidents are connected together rather loosely by an intrigue, and the ending is with the ringing of wedding bells.. The Victorian fiction (novel) is an extraordinary mixture of sentiment, flashy melodrama and lifeless characters. There is much that is improbable and artificial in character and incident. Speaking generally, the.Victorians fail to construct an organic plot in which.every incident and character forms an integral part.of the whole. Victorian fiction (novel) makes interesting reading.
The novelists may not construct a compact plot, but they tell the story so well. They are so entertaining that children still love to read and enjoy novels by Dickens or Thackeray. The reader's attention is not allowed to flageven for a single moment. They do not like to give it up unfinished. The Victorian novelists(fictionists) may miss the heights and depths of human passion, there may be no probing of the human heart and no psycho- analysis as in the modern novel, but they cast their nets very wide. The Victorian Novelist is a man of varied moods. His rang of mood is as wide as his range of subject.
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Note on Modern Short Story
Just as he deals with all aspects of society, so also he renders human moods in all their manifold variety. He is not a specialist in any one mood or temper. The novelists of the age cannot be categorised. As David Cecil puts it, "They write equally for the train journey and for all time; they crowd realism and fantasy, thrills and theories, knock out farce and effects of pure aesthetic beauty, cheek by jowl on the same page; they are Mr. Galsworthy and Mr. Huxley and Mrs. Woolf, Mrs. Christie and Mr. Woodhouse, all in one.
A book like David Copperfield is a sort of vast schoolboy hamper of fiction with sweets and sandwiches, pots of jam with their greased paper caps, cream and nuts and glossy apples, all packed together in a heterogeneous deliciousness.
Creative imagination is also seen in the humour of the Victorian novelists. Each of the great Victorian novelists is a humorist, and each is a humorist in a style of his own. They have created a number of immortal figures of fun, each is comic in his own different way. There are hundreds of fine jokes and witty remarks spread all over the Victorian novel. The Victorians are all able to make their characters "live". Their characters may not always be real, there may be much in them that is improbable and false, but they are amazingly and indomitably alive.
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They are wonderfully energetic and vital. They are all individuals living their own existence, and lingering long in the memory once we have formed an acquaintance with them. They act in their own characteristic way; they have their own tricks of speech, their own way of saying and doing things.
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