Dr Jeremy Scott, Senior Lecturer in the department of English Language & Linguistics, and Dr Paul March-Russell, Lecturer in Comparative Literature, have recently published chapters in The Edinburgh Companion to the Short Story in English (Edinburgh University Press, 2018).

The Edinburgh Companion to the Short Story in English presents new scholarly essays on the short story in English as a phenomenon of world literature, and explores the history and development of the anglophone short story since the beginning of the nineteenth century. This collection of innovative essays by new and established scholars explores these and other questions, addressing stories from around the world, and considering their relationship to place, identity, history and genre.

“This paper investigates the expressive and methodological possibilities inherent in writing ‘short’ through close analysis of the narrative structure and prose style of a sample of what can be classified variously as ‘postmodern’, experimental and anti-realist short stories,” Jeremy Scott writes in regards to his chapter ‘Experimental Short Stories’. “The paper’s thesis is that the experimental short story genre can be defined and delineated in a principled manner with reference to concepts drawn from stylistics, and that such definition has useful implications and lessons for both creative practice in general.”

Paul March-Russell’s chapter, ‘Impressionism and the Short Story’, looks at the complicated history and multiple meanings of Impressionism in philosophy, aesthetics and the visual arts before focusing on short story writers such as Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf.