The British Short Story : Crime, Horror and Fantasy

British Short Story: The short story is a particular form with its specific rules and traditions which has developped in the last 150 years to cover practically every genre and sub-genre of fiction. The British short story in particular has thrived in popular fiction, the so-called minor genres, and
enjoyed a great success with the reading public. In this course we shall be looking at a century and
a half of crime, fantasy and horror and charting what has changed and what remained the same in this specific form of deceptively light entertainment.

Tales of the American South: The short story has always been a popular literary form in the United States. Very often, stories can be read in newspapers like The Saturday Evening Post, or in magazines, like The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Ladies Home Journal, Redbook…, before they are collected in book form. This is the case for a huge proportion of the stories we will be looking at in this class. We will be paying particular attention to the structure of each story and to the elements they all have in common by focusing on the gothic, the grotesque and the fantastic. After introducing the short story as a literary genre by reading essays penned by Melville, Poe and Welty, we will try to define the major elements needed to define a story as gothic or fantastic. We will also see in what ways a situation and a character can be defined as grotesque and what means the writer brings into play to achieve a “unity of effect” (Poe).