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A brief history of Short Story:
By Dr. Elangbam Hemanta Singh, Dept. Of English, Ideal Girls College, Imphal, Manipur, India, E-mail:
[email protected] ; Mobile No: 09856253448
It is a brief work of prose fiction. Like the novel, it may be written in the mode
of parable, fable, fantasy, realism, naturalism, comedy, tragedy, romance, or
satire, and moreover, is capable of organizing the action, thought, and dialogue
of its characters. In other words, it can be a true presentation or a parody,
sentimental or satirical, serious in intent or a light-hearted diversion; or any of
these, but it should be memorable. As a narrative which can be read at one
sitting of from half an hour to two hours—it presents in a single effect, or in
other words, the economy of management. According to Graham Balfour,
‘’There are three ways...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 it, or lastly you may take a certain atmosphere, and get
actions and persons to realise it.” Further he said that the writer must have an
‘impression’ or ‘idea’ to communicate the reader by engaging his attention
from the beginning to the end. In other words, he must see the end in the
beginning. Along with this, Edgar Allan Poe said that a skilful literary artist
should not create his thoughts at the start to accommodate his incidents but
having conceived with deliberate care. Then by inventing such incidents, he
could combine such events as may best help him in establishing the
preconceived effect. The very opening sentence of the story should be striking
one to give a certain unique or single effect, but there should not be any clue
or word which might lead to the one pre-established design. In addition, it
shares the usual constituents of all fiction—plot, character, and setting, but
they cannot be treated with the same detail as in a novel. Each has to be
reduced to the minimum in the interest of the impression/ idea so that they
could convey together towards the preconceived/ final effect, but no
superfluous detail which may retards the progress. In short, they are all a
means to an end. Therefore, the plot must confine to the essentials, the
characters to the indispensables, and the setting to a few suggestive hints.
This genre/ short narrative of fiction, in both verse and prose, is one of the
oldest and most widespread of literary forms such as myth, legend, parable,
fairy tale, folklore, fable, anecdote, and even the ballad. For example, we can
find the stories of Cain and Abel, Ruth, Judith and Suzannah in the Bible. Other
examples are Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1385-1400), but lack of a proper
prose medium; Boccaccio’s Decameron (c. 1349-51).
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In France, this kind of story, the conte or nouvelle was established in the 17th
century by La Fontaine’s Amours de Psyche et de Cupidon (1669), in Spanish
novella, in Italian novella, in German Novella, in Russian skaz.
In the 18th century, it was being developed and established in Britain, partly as
a result of the popularity of the oriental tale and the Gothic novel. For example
in the work of Steele and Addison, it was different from the present-day short
stories of impression or idea.
In the 19th century the short story was highly evolved, especially in the shape
of the ghost story and the horror story—stories with the supernatural,
suspense and mystery. This popularity was continued in the 20th century. The
major writers at this stage were— Germans E.T.A. Hoffman (1776-1822),
Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811),
In Russia it was popularised by Alexander Pushkin’s The Tales of Belkin, The
Queen of Spades, The Captain’s Daughter; Gogol’s Notes of a Madam, The
Portrait, The Overcoat; Leo Tolstoy’s The death of Ivan Ilyich; Anton Chekhov’s
The Man in a Case, Gooseberries.
In France it was popularised by Merimee, Balzac, Gautier, Alphonse Daudet,
Flaubert and Guy de Maupassant.
In Britain, Sir Walter Scott’s Wandering Willie’s Tale (1824) makes the first
English approach to the modern type; Thomas Hardy’s Wessex Tales, A
Changed Man and Other Tales; Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective stories—The
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes; H. G. Wells’
science fiction stories—The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, etc. By the turn
of the 20th century Chesterton published a collection of detective series, The
Innocence of Father Brown; E.M. foster’s The Celestial Omnibus, The Eternal
Moments; Katherine Mansfield’s In a German Pension, The Garden Party, etc.
Joseph Conrad’s Tales of Unrest, Heart of Darkness, etc; R.I. Stevenson’s The
Merry Men and Other Tales; Kipling’s Traffics and Discoveries, etc; W.W.
Jacobs’s Many Cargoes, Night Watches; George Moore’s The Untilled Field;
Saki’s Reginald in Russia, Beasts and Superbeasts, etc.
In America, Washington Irving (1783-1859)—his adaptations of German folk
tales, (e.g. Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow), Nathaniel
Hawthorne (1804-64) (e.g. Twice-Told Tales), Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49)
especially excelled in the detective story—The Murders in the Rue Morgue, and
also in the Gothic story—The Pit and the Pendulum and in the science fiction/
tale—The Gold Bug. As far as the short story is concerned in the mid-19th
century Poe was a major influence. Apart from these writers, we come across
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the contributions of short story writers during the second half of the 19th
century in American literature—Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener,
Benito Cereno, etc; Mark Twain’s The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calveras
County and Other Sketches etc; Francis Bret Harte’s The Luck of Roaring Camp
and Other Sketches; Henry James’s A Passionate Pilgrim, Daisy Miller, Tales of
Three Cities, The Aspern Papers, etc; Ambrose Bierce’s Tales of Soldiers and
Civilians; Stephen Crane’s The Open Boat and Other Tales of Adventure, The
Monster and Other Stories; In the 20th century, Jack London’s The Son of the
Wolf, Tales of the Far North, Two Thousand Dozen, etc; O. Henry’s Cabbages
and Kings, The Four Million, The Roads of Destiny, etc; Sherwood Anderson’s
The Triumph of the Egg, Horses and Men.
In India, the first Indian English short story collections appeared in the late
19th century—Realities of Indian Life: Stories Collected from the Criminal
Reports of India (London, 1885) by Shoshee Chunder Dutta and The Times of
Yore: Tales from Indian History (London, 1885) by Shoshee Chunder Dutta and
Sourindra Mohan Tagore. At the beginning of the 20th century, we have a
considerable literary output in this genre with Cornelia Sorabji, a Parsi lady
educated in Britain, became the first woman advocate in Calcutta in 1924. Her
four collections were published in London: Love and Life Behind the Purdah
(1901); Sunbabies: Studies in the Child Life of India (1904); Between the
Twilights: Being Studies of Indian Women by one of Themselves (1908); and
Indian Tales of the Great Ones among Men, Women and Bird-People (1916)
presenting about Hindu and Parsi life with social reform in a Victorian manner.
Like the novel, the themes in Indian short story during the Gandhian age were
rustic life, social reform—especially the plight of woman in traditional Hindu
society,—as one can find in the works of Shankar Ram (T.L. Natesan) and
A.S.P.Ayyar. In the Post Independence of India, the most notable contributions
regarding the short story made by S.K. Chettur, G.K. Chettur, K.S.
Venkataramani and K. Nagarajan—all of them are from South India. Many of
the stories are based on village feuds, murders, local legends about serpents,
ghosts and omens, and the Gandhian ferment as well as fantasy, psychology,
and the supernatural. Apart from the above writers, the most signal
contribution to this field came from the three major novelists—Mulk Raj
Anand, RK Narayan and Raja Rao.
In Manipur (India), the first short story collections published just after the end
of the World War II—Leikonnungda (In the Garden,1946) and Leinungshi
(Sweet Flower,1946) by RK Shitaljit. Then, RK Elangbam came on this genre
with his collections, Chingya Tamya (Hills and Glades, 1955) and Yumgi Mou
(The Housewife, 1958). After these two pioneers, a number of writers
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contributed in this variety—MK Binodini Devi appeared with her short story,
Nunggairakta-Chandramukhi (Chrysanthemum Amidst Pebbles, 1965);
Chenkhidraba Eechel (The Choked Current, 1965), Ilisa Amagi Mahao (The
Taste of a Hilsa, 1973) and Thawanmichak Amana Kenkhiba (The Fall of a Star,
1973) by N. Kunjamohan Singh; Ichegi Sam (Sister’s Wig, 1965) by Kh. Prakash
Singh; and many others.
Reference:
1) Abrams, M.H. A Glossary of Literary Terms (7th edition). Bangalore:
Thomson Heinle, 1999.
2) Cuddon, J.A. Dictionary of Literary Terms & Literary Theory (4th edition&
revised by C.E. Preston). Penguin Books, 1976.
3) Naik, M.K. A History of Indian English Literature. Delhi: Sahitya Akademi,
1982 (2007).
4) Prasad, B. A Background to the Study of English Literature for Indian
Students. Macmillan India, 1965 (1981).
5) Singh, Ch. Manihar. A History of Manipuri Literature. Delhi: Sahitya
Akademi, 1996 (2003).
