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Viorica Patea, ed. Short Story Theories: A Twenty-FirstCentury Perspective. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2012. ix + 346 pp. US$101, euro89.
While I suspect that it is a little early in the new century to subtitle a collection of essays "a twenty-first-century perspective," I understand that the impulse springs from the desire to differentiate the book from what presumably counted as twentieth-century short story theory. It is accurate enough to imply that one can trace a trajectory going from Brander Matthews's The Philosophy of the Short-Story (1901) to the late twentieth- century collections of essays such as Susan Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey's Short Story Theory at a Crossroads (1989) as well as Charles E. May's Short Story Theories (1976) and The New Short Story Theories (1994). Viorica Patea's collection does open up some new approaches to short story studies, but it comes as no surprise to note that in each of these books mentioned, whose publication dates span over one hundred years, of all those who have contributed to short story theory, it's a mid nineteenth-century writer who figures the most prominently: Edgar Allan Poe. As every short story theorist knows, when Poe reviewed Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice- Told Tales in 1842, he initiated short story theory by advancing the idea that it is incumbent upon literary critics to ponder the nature of genre when they investigate individual short stories. If his belief that a story should strive for a "single effect" (61) divides scholars almost equally, Poe's attention to the reading experience anticipated how reader response and analyses of closure would occupy subsequent short story theorists. As Erik Van Achter convincingly demonstrates in "Revising Theory: Poe's Legacy in Short Story Criticism" from the Patea collection, almost all twentieth-century approaches to the short story are variations on Poe's original formulations.
Furthermore, it is noteworthy that it was Poe as a successful short story writer who first began theorizing about short fiction. Practitioners of the form, especially in the twentieth century, have played a central role in mapping out the genre's dimensions. I will return to this phenomenon later; let me now only note that writers such as Julio Cortázar, Nadine Gordimer, and Frank O'Connor (among numerous others) were fundamental in developing a provisional poetics of...