Dr Mike Collins on The Drama of the American Short Story

The second episode of the Research Podcast Series is a discussion of Mike Collins’s new book for University of Michigan Press, The Drama of the American Short Story, 1800 – 1865 with Dr. Lyons, Dr. Grattan and Dr. Norman in the School of English. Dr. Collins’s book is a new history of a major form of American writing, which seeks to draw links between the development of the short story and theatrical culture in the early USA. Tracking the development of the form alongside the resurgence of theatre and drama in the USA in the early republic and antebellum eras, Collins’s book suggests that, rather than being treated as a form that focuses on romantic alienation and epiphany, the short story in this period was a social form of writing that was heavily reliant on gesture, ritual and performance for its dominant meanings. The podcast discussion ranges widely around questions of the fate of New Historicism, the pleasures and pains of writing academic monographs, the politics of literary form, and, at one point, Dungeons and Dragons.