New chapters on the history of the short story

Two members of the Department of Comparative Literature have just been published in the new collection The Cambridge History of the English Short Story (Cambridge University Press, 2016), edited by Dominic Head from the University of Nottingham.

Both Dr Axel Stahler, Reader in Comparative Literature, and Dr Paul March-Russell, Specialist Associate Lecturer in Comparative Literature, have contributed chapters. The collection is the first comprehensive volume to chart the origins and evolution of the English short story to the present day. Written by international experts in the field, it covers numerous transnational and historical connections between writers, modes and forms of transmission.

Axel’s chapter, entitled ‘Stories of Jewish Identity: Survivors, Exiles and Cosmopolitans’ focuses on the British Jewish short story in English, which in the past has suffered a surprising lack of recognition.

The chapter by Paul March-Russell is entitled ‘Frontiers: Science Fiction and the British Marketplace’. Not only does the short story lie at the intersection between high and low culture, between the little magazine and the mass-market periodical, as Tim Armstrong has observed, but so too does science fiction.

For more details, please see the publisher’s website.