B. A. Part-I Opt. English Title.Pmd

HI SHIVAJI UNIVERSITY, KOLHAPUR CENTRE FOR DISTANCE EDUCATION Modern Indian Writing in English Translation (Optional English) (Academic Year 2019-20 onwards) For B. A. Part I (Semester I & II) KJ Module 1 SHORT STORY AS A MINOR FORM OF LITERATURE Index: 1.0 Objectives 1.1 Introduction 1.2 Content 1.2.1 Origin and Development of Short Story 1.2.2 Short Story: Definitions and Characteristics 1.2.3 Elements of Short Story Check Your Progress: 1.3 Summary 1.4 Terms to Remember 1.5 Answers to Check Your Progress: 1.6 Exercises 1.7 Reference for Further Study 1.0 Objectives: This unit will provide an introduction to the development of the short story as a form of literature. After studying this unit, students will be able to : ••• know developments, themes and elements of the short story. ••• develop an interest in appreciation of literature. ••• interpret texts with due sensitivity to both textual and contextual clues. ••• use English effectively for study purpose across the curriculum. ••• demonstrate an understanding of short story as an evolving art form that reflects the values and concerns of writers and the societies in which they live. 1 1.1 Introduction: Story has been existing since the dawn of the human civilization. Different kinds of stories prevail: stories, tales, fables, parables, anecdotes and folk-tales in different languages in all countries. However, the short story differs from them. Only the common thing in them is story telling. Short story is a story first and then it is a short story. The impulses behind short story and other types of stories are the same viz; 1. The curiosity to know others. 2. The desire for self-assertion. 3. Love for story-telling and listening. As a minor form of literature, a short story is a brief, and therefore easily apprehensible as completed work, usually entertaining, frequently intriguing in both form and content. Short stories tend to be less complex than novels. Usually, a short story focuses on only one incident, has a single plot, a single setting, a limited number of characters, and covers a short period of time. The Short Story As A Form of Literature The short story is a form of literature which has come to us from ancient times. It has its roots in the instinct of curiosity in man. In the beginning, the stories were told primarily by the method of narration, but with the invention of the printing press, the vogue of the story spread widely. A number of stories, belonging to both the Western and the Eastern countries, are now found in such collections as The Parables of Jatakas, Aesops Fables, The Buddhist Jataks, Arabian Nights, Entertainments, The Panchatantra and The Hitopadesha. The short story, often regarded as a younger and perhaps inferior sister of the novel, is genealogically its ancestor, for short stories in some form or the other- myths, fables, Biblical Parables, fairy tales etc. preceded the novel. “The short story is an autonomous genre of literature, cultivated practically in all important countries of the world, with its varying sets of rules and experiments, a storehouse of a nations evolving culture and social or individual concerns, though in humorous slices much shorter, but generally more palatable and hence more popular than novel” The short story has remained very popular form though Television and Radio compete with the short story in the field of entertainment. The short story has 2 followed the march of human civilization and become a cultural means of expression. 1.2 Content: 1.2.1 Origin and Development of Short Story: Story - telling is an ancient art. It is as old as language itself. Walter Allen says, stories are called tales and as etymology indicates, the tale was an oral form. But in the recent times, it is considered as an important form of literature. Oral and written stories were found in the ancient times. Oral stories gave place to written stories. Afterwards such stories were called tales and they occur in The Old Testament and The New Testament . Most of the early stories were written in verse. The first short prose stories appeared during the Renaissance period. Its example is Robert Greene’s The Conney Catching Tracts . When the story was in the form of tale or fable it was fiction. It was classified as fiction because the writing was purely based on imagination. But, in the modern context, the short stories have blending of imagination and a sense of reality. Everyone is born with an instinctive desire to be entertained by fiction. When did this fiction begin? In this context, Grove Day, the author of Art of Narration says : A cave dweller of ancient times say by the fire, telling his shaggy family and friends about his adventures while hunting a wild pig. Here and there he began adding a few existing touches to make his listeners hang upon his words. Perhaps the pig become a bison, or even a mammoth. The climax of his victorious struggle was applauded by the listeners(Grove, 1971:9). Like this, the primitive people might have created small stories about animals, birds and plants around them. Later on, in the old days the stories were told to teach moral lessons. It was employed as a tool in teaching moral lessons. The great moral teachers like Buddha and Christ realized that they could convey their great moral teaching through parables or fables. But there is a difference between the earlier tales of adventures or the moral tales of religious teachers and the modern stories. The earlier story-teller told his tales to transport us to an imaginary world of beauty and charm or to bring home some moral truth. Narration becomes fine art especially 3 in the Orient, in Persia, Arabia and some parts of India. The story-teller was a professional entertainer. As far as short story in European tradition is concerned the Greeks and the Romans were the first to tell stories in verse. Genesis is believed to be a treasure- house of fine tales. Almost all epics like the Iliad , the Odyseey , the Edda and Beowulf contain many episodes. In the Middle Ages some very interesting stories from Italy and France were spread in Europe. The Chief among them was a collection of stories by Baccacio, named The Decameron (1353). Then Chaucer wrote one of the Canterbury tales, The Story of Melibens in prose before 1400. The stories of Ali Baba, Sindbad, the sailor and others are included in the collection known as The Arabian Nights written around 1450. Towards the end of Middle Ages, Sir Thomas Malory wrote the episodic adventures of the rascally Dutch. He published a fine collection of prose tales called Morte d' Arthur . In the Elizabethan period most of the fables and stories like The Celtic fairy Tales (about the lives of saints) came from Italy and other countries. Tales about the lives of saints and many fables came from Italy and other Countries. In this period, Thomas Nash, Robert Greene and John Lyly wrote some very interesting stories in prose. Most of these stories were mere romances. Thomas Deloney was the first Elizabethan to use good prose for writing stories in his Gentle Craft . He was the first realist, who wrote good stories about everyday life of the ordinary persons. In the seventeenth century, the character writers like Earle, Overbury and Herbert showed how to paint a character in a short story. The short story got direction about the plot construction in the Restoration period. The rise of magazines, the founding of a periodicals and news papers provided the opportunity for writing short stories. The leaders like Steele and Addison created a field for essay as well as the tale. They made progress in their Tatler and the Spectator . The tales that were written were dreams and allegories. But tales in the real sense of the term were written in the Adventures, under the editorship of Hawkesworth. One such tale by him was Amurath , which liked by the critics as well as the general readers. In the eighteenth century, Dr. Johnson, Goldsmith and others followed Hawkesworth in writing stories. They wrote stories like Asem, an Eastern Tale and 4 the Adventurer of a strolling player in a delightful style, in which fact and fancy, humour and wit are blended together cleverly. In the nineteenth century, short story as a literary form became popular. The short story was enriched and systematized by the American writers like Hawthorne, Bret Harte, Henry James, Washington Irving and Edgar Allen Poe. Bret Harte enriched the short story by the introduction of local colour and also he made his short-stories vehicles of single impressions. In the same way Henny James showed how short stories could be made suggestive and how they could be used to describe the mental and psychological states of a character. The British writers followed them. The short story is relatively new literary fictional prose form. Modern short story has a brief history of 150 years only. The American writer, Edgar Allen Poe is regarded as the father of Modern short story. The publication of his story MS Found in a Battle in 1833 is considered to be the first modern, proper short story. His stories are known for his skill of narration and local colour. His technique was different from the earlier short story writers. Poe gave his concept of the theory of short story in 1842 in his review of Nathenial Hawthorne's Twice Told Tales , a collection of short stories. The French and Russian masters also helped in the development of the short story in England.

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