Difficult contemporary short stories; |b William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, Dylan Thomas, Eudora Welty and Virginia Woolf

Abstract

The definition of a short story is made complex because the people who write them are always changing the rules without consulting the critics. As a result, what was a good definition in 1900 is not good today. If one were to attempt a 1954 definition, he might come up with something similar to the one in the current O. Henry collection to the effect that the only thing a short story should be is a brief fictional narrative that achieves an aesthetic effect of emotional depth which, at first glance, would seen to be out of proportion to the apparently simple scope of the work. It is a definition which acknowledges an emotional depth, or complexity, and in this acknowledgement differ s from definitions of 50 years ago or more.