Introduction

The earlier seventeenth century, and especially the period of the English Revolution (1640–60), was a time of intense ferment in all areas of life — religion, science, politics, domestic relations, culture. That ferment was reflected in the literature of the era, which also registered a heightened focus on and analysis of the self and the personal life. However, little of this seems in evidence in the elaborate frontispiece to Michael Drayton's long "chorographical" poem on the landscape, regions, and local history of Great Britain (1612), which appeared in the first years of the reign of the Stuart king James I (1603–1625). The frontispiece appears to represent a peaceful, prosperous, triumphant Britain, with England, Scotland, and Wales united, patriarchy and monarchy firmly established, and the nation serving as the great theme for lofty literary celebration. Albion (the Roman name for Britain) is a young and beautiful virgin wearing as cloak a map featuring rivers, trees, mountains, churches, towns; she carries a scepter and holds a cornucopia, symbol of plenty. Ships on the horizon signify exploration, trade, and garnering the riches of the sea. In the four corners stand four conquerors whose descendants ruled over Britain: the legendary Brutus, Julius Caesar, Hengist the Saxon, and the Norman William the Conqueror, "whose line yet rules," as Drayton's introductory poem states.

Yet this frontispiece also registers some of the tensions, conflicts, and redefinitions evident in the literature of the period and explored more directly in the topics and texts in this portion of the NTO Web site. It is Albion herself, not King James, who is seated in the center holding the emblems of sovereignty; her male conquerors stand to the side, and their smaller size and their number suggest something unstable in monarchy and patriarchy. Albion's robe with its multiplicity of regional features, as well as the "Poly" of the title, suggests forces pulling against national unity. Also, Poly-Olbion had no successors: instead of a celebration of the nation in the vein of Spenser's Faerie Queene or Poly-Olbion itself, the great seventeenth-century heroic poem, Paradise Lost, treats the Fall of Man and its tragic consequences, "all our woe."

The first topic here, "Gender, Family, Household: Seventeenth-Century Norms and Controversies," provides important religious, legal, and domestic advice texts through which to explore cultural assumptions about gender roles and the patriarchal family. It also invites attention to how those assumptions are modified or challenged in the practices of actual families and households; in tracts on transgressive subjects (cross-dressing, women speaking in church, divorce); in women's texts asserting women's worth, talents, and rights; and especially in the upheavals of the English Revolution.

"Paradise Lost in Context," the second topic for this period, surrounds that radically revisionist epic with texts that invite readers to examine how it engages with the interpretative traditions surrounding the Genesis story, how it uses classical myth, how it challenges orthodox notions of Edenic innocence, and how it is positioned within but also against the epic tradition from Homer to Virgil to Du Bartas. The protagonists here are not martial heroes but a domestic couple who must, both before and after their Fall, deal with questions hotly contested in the seventeenth century but also perennial: how to build a good marital relationship; how to think about science, astronomy, and the nature of things; what constitutes tyranny, servitude, and liberty; what history teaches; how to meet the daily challenges of love, work, education, change, temptation, and deceptive rhetoric; how to reconcile free will and divine providence; and how to understand and respond to God's ways.

[Click on image to enlarge] The third topic, "Civil Wars of Ideas: Seventeenth-Century Politics, Religion, and Culture," provides an opportunity to explore, through political and polemical treatises and striking images, some of the issues and conflicts that led to civil war and the overthrow of monarchical government (1642–60). These include royal absolutism vs. parliamentary or popular sovereignty, monarchy vs. republicanism, Puritanism vs. Anglicanism, church ritual and ornament vs. iconoclasm, toleration vs. religious uniformity, and controversies over court masques and Sunday sports. The climax to all this was the highly dramatic trial and execution of King Charles I (January 1649), a cataclysmic event that sent shock waves through courts, hierarchical institutions, and traditionalists everywhere; this event is presented here through contemporary accounts and graphic images.

Notes:

* After more than four decades on the throne, Elizabeth I died in 1603. James VI of Scotland succeeded her,
becoming James I and establishing the Stuart dynasty.
* Political and religious tensions intensified under James’s son, Charles I, who succeeded to the throne in 1625.
* As ideas changed, so did the conditions of their dissemination.
* In the early seventeenth century, John Donne, Ben Jonson, and George Herbert led the shift towards “new” poetic genres.
* Many leading poets were staunch royalists, or Cavaliers, who suffered heavily in the war years. Yet two of the best writers of the period, John Milton and Andrew Marvell, sided with the republic.

Summaries

After more than four decades on the throne, Elizabeth I died in 1603. James VI of Scotland succeeded her without the attempted coups that many had feared. Writers jubilantly noted that the new ruler had literary inclinations. Yet both in his literary works and on the throne James expounded authoritarian theories of kingship that seemed incompatible with the English tradition of "mixed" government. Kings, James believed, derived their power from God rather than from the people. James was notorious for his financial heedlessness, and his disturbing tendency to bestow high office on good-looking male favorites. The period had complex attitudes to same-sex relationships, and James’s susceptibility to lovely, expensive youths was seen as more a political than a moral calamity. Yet James was successful in keeping England out of European wars, and encouraging colonial projects in the New World and economic growth at home. The most important religious event of James’s reign was a newly commissioned translation of the Bible.

Political and religious tensions intensified under James’s son, Charles I, who succeeded to the throne in 1625. Between 1629 and 1638, Charles attempted to rule without Parliament. Charles married the French princess Henrietta Maria, who promoted a conversion back to Catholicism. The appointment of William Laud as the archbishop of Canterbury further alienated Puritans, as Laud aligned the doctrine and ceremonies of the English church with Roman Catholicism. In 1642 a Civil War broke out between the king’s forces and armies loyal to the House of Commons. The conflict ended with Charles’s defeat and beheading in 1649. In the 1650s, as “Lord Protector,” Oliver Cromwell wielded power nearly as autocratically as Charles had done. In 1660, Parliament invited the old king’s son, Charles II, home from exile. Yet the twenty-year period between 1640 and 1660 had seen the emergence of concepts that would remain central to bourgeois thought for centuries to come: religious toleration, separation of church and state, freedom from press censorship, and popular sovereignty. Among the more radical voices to emerge in the period were those of Roger Williams, who advocated religious toleration, the Leveller, John Lilburne, who advocated universal male suffrage, and the Digger, Gerrard Winstanley, who advocated Christian communism.

Early seventeenth-century writers such as John Donne, Ben Jonson, and Robert Burton inherited a system of knowledge founded on analogy, order, and hierarchy. In this system, a monarch was like God, the ruler of the universe, and also like a father, the head of the family. Yet this conceptual system was beginning to crumble in the face of the scientific and empirical approach to knowledge advocated by Francis Bacon. William Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of blood and Galileo’s demonstration that the earth revolved around the sun disrupted long-held certainties. As ideas changed, so did the conditions of their dissemination. Although elite poets like John Donne often preferred to circulate their works in manuscript, the printing of all kinds of literary works was becoming more common. Printers and acting companies were obliged to submit works to the censor before public presentation, and those who flouted the censorship laws were subject to heavy punishment. Since overt criticism or satire of the great was dangerous, political writing before the Civil War was apt to be oblique and allegorical.

In the early seventeenth century, John Donne, Ben Jonson, and George Herbert led the shift towards “new” poetic genres. These included classical elegy and satire, epigram, verse epistle, meditative religious lyric, and the country-house poem. Jonson distinguished himself as an acute observer of urban manners. He mentored a group of younger poets, including Herrick and Carew, known as the Tribe or Sons of Ben. Donne’s poetry concerns itself not with a crowded social panorama, but with a dyad—the speaker and either a woman, or God. Donne delights in making the overlap between sexual and religious love seem new and shocking, and he has been regarded as a founder of “Metaphysical” poetry. Among the “Metaphysical poets” Herbert, with his complex religious sensibility wedded to great artistic sensibility, had a profound influence on younger poets like Crashaw and Vaughan. The reigns of the first two Stuart kings also marked the entry of women in some numbers into authorship and publication.

The Civil War was disastrous for the English theater, with the closure of the playhouses in 1642. Many leading poets were staunch royalists, or Cavaliers, who suffered heavily in the war years. Yet two of the best writers of the period, John Milton and Andrew Marvell, sided with the republic. Marvell’s conflictual world-view is unmistakably a product of the Civil War decades. Milton’s loyalty to the revolution remained unwavering despite his disillusion when it failed to realize his ideals. The revolutionary era also gave new impetus to women’s writing on both sides of the political divide.

* Adapted from: Norton Anthology of English Literature

As I presented you the list of "5o Great Short Stories", now I'm going to present the list of "50 Great Novels of All Time". Browsing among 5 different surveys about the best novels, I decided to pick the most famous and of course the richest in literature of all and enlisted them for you. Later on we will read and discouse these novels here. I assure you that these novels are UNPUTDOWNABLE. Here's the list:

1. Don Quixote Miguel De Cervantes
2. Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert
3. One Hundred Years Of Solitude Gabriel Garcia Marquez
4. Robinson Crusoe Daniel Defoe
5. Gulliver’s Travels Jonathan Swift
6. Emma Jane Austen
7. Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain
8. The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne
9. Frankenstein Mary Shelley
10. To Kill A Mockingbird Harper Lee
11. Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte
12. Jane Eyre Charlotte Bronte
13. Little Women Louisa M. Alcott
14. The Count Of Monte Cristo Alexandre Dumas
15. David Copperfield Charles Dickens
16. Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde Robert Louis Stevenson
17. Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland Lewis Carroll
18. Moby-Dick Herman Melville
19. Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy
20. Daniel Deronda George Eliot
21. The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoevsky
22. Men Without Women Ernest Hemingway
23. Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell
24. The Grapes Of Wrath John Steinbeck
25. Animal Farm George Orwell
26. The Portrait Of A Lady Henry James
27. The Picture Of Dorian Gray Oscar Wilde
28. Jude The Obscure Thomas Hardy
29. The Call Of The Wild Jack London
30. Nostromo Joseph Conrad
31. Ulysses James Joyce
32. Mrs Dalloway Virginia Woolf
33. The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald
34. The Sun Also Rises Ernest Hemingway
35. The Trial Franz Kafka
36. As I Lay Dying William Faulkner
37. Heart Of Darkness Joseph Conrad
38. A Farewell To Arms Ernest Hemingway
39. Lolita Vladimir Nabokov
40. Atonement Ian Mcewan
41. Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe
42. Sons And Lovers D.H. Lawrence
43. To The Lighthouse Virginia Woolf
44. Gone With The Wind Margaret Mitchell
45. All The King's Men Robert Penn Warren
46. Lord Of The Flies William Golding
47. Women In Love D.H. Lawrence
48. The Death Of The Heart Elizabeth Bowen
49. The Lord Of The Rings J. R. R. Tolkien
50. The Bfg Roald Dahl

Introduction

Literary works in sixteenth-century England were rarely if ever created in isolation from other currents in the social and cultural world. The boundaries that divided the texts we now regard as aesthetic from other texts were porous and constantly shifting. It is perfectly acceptable, of course, for the purposes of reading to redraw these boundaries more decisively, treating Renaissance texts as if they were islands of the autonomous literary imagination. One of the greatest writers of the period, Sir Philip Sidney, defended poetry in just such terms; the poet, Sidney writes in The Defence of Poetry (NAEL 8, 1.953–74), is not constrained by nature or history but freely ranges "only within the zodiac of his own wit." But Sidney knew well, and from painful personal experience, how much this vision of golden autonomy was contracted by the pressures, perils, and longings of the brazen world. And only a few pages after he imagines the poet orbiting entirely within the constellations of his own intellect, he advances a very different vision, one in which the poet's words not only imitate reality but also actively change it.

We have no way of knowing to what extent, if at all, this dream of literary power was ever realized in the world. We do know that many sixteenth-century artists, such as Christopher Marlowe, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare, brooded on the magical, transforming power of art. This power could be associated with civility and virtue, as Sidney claims, but it could also have the demonic qualities manifested by the "pleasing words" of Spenser's enchanter, Archimago (NAEL 8, 1.714–902), or by the incantations of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus (NAEL 8, 1.1022–1057). It is significant that Marlowe's great play was written at a time in which the possibility of sorcery was not merely a theatrical fantasy but a widely shared fear, a fear upon which the state could act — as the case of Doctor Fian vividly shows — with horrendous ferocity. Marlowe was himself the object of suspicion and hostility, as indicated by the strange report filed by a secret agent, Richard Baines, professing to list Marlowe's wildly heretical opinions, and by the gleeful (and factually inaccurate) report by the Puritan Thomas Beard of Marlowe's death.

Marlowe's tragedy emerges not only from a culture in which bargains with the devil are imaginable as real events but also from a world in which many of the most fundamental assumptions about spiritual life were being called into question by the movement known as the Reformation. Catholic and Protestant voices struggled to articulate the precise beliefs and practices thought necessary for the soul's salvation. One key site of conflict was the Bible, with Catholic authorities trying unsuccessfully to stop the circulation of the unauthorized Protestant translation of Scripture by William Tyndale, a translation in which doctrines and institutional structures central to the Roman Catholic church were directly challenged. Those doctrines and structures, above all the interpretation of the central ritual of the eucharist, or Lord's Supper, were contested with murderous ferocity, as the fates of the Protestant martyr Anne Askew and the Catholic martyr Robert Aske make painfully clear. The Reformation is closely linked to many of the texts printed in the sixteenth-century section of the Norton Anthology: Book 1 of Spenser's Faerie Queene (NAEL 8, 1.719–856), for example, in which a staunchly Protestant knight of Holiness struggles against the satanic forces of Roman Catholicism, or the Protestant propagandist Foxe's account of Lady Jane Grey's execution (NAEL 8, 1.674-75), or the Catholic Robert Southwell's moving religious lyric, "The Burning Babe" (NAEL 8, 1.640-41).

If these windows on the Reformation offer a revealing glimpse of the inner lives of men and women in Tudor England, the subsection entitled "The Wider World" provides a glimpse of the huge world that lay beyond the boundaries of the kingdom, a world that the English were feverishly attempting to explore and exploit. Ruthless military expeditions and English settlers (including the poet Edmund Spenser) struggled to subdue and colonize nearby Ireland, but with very limited success. Farther afield, merchants from cities such as London and Bristol established profitable trading links to markets in North Africa, Turkey, and Russia. And daring seamen such as Drake and Cavendish commanded voyages to still more distant lands. The texts collected here, which supplement the selections from Ralegh's Discoverie of Guiana (NAEL 8, 1.923-26) and Hariot's Brief and True Report (NAEL 1.938-43) in the Norton Anthology, are fascinating, disturbing records of intense human curiosity, greed, fear, wonder, and intelligence. And lest we imagine that the English were only the observers of the world and never the observed, "The Wider World" includes a sample of a foreign tourist's description of London. The tourist, Thomas Platter, had the good sense to go to the theater and to see, as so many thousands of visitors to England have done since, a play by Shakespeare.

The Sixteenth Century: Summary

Notes:

• By 1600, though English remained somewhat peripheral on the continent, it had been transformed into an immensely powerful expressive medium, as employed by Shakespeare, Marlowe, and the translators of the Bible.
• The development of the English language is linked to the consolidation and strengthening of the English state.
• Rather than the flowering of visual arts and architecture that had occurred in Italy, the Renaissance emerged in Britain through an intellectual orientation to humanism.
• The Protestant Reformation, with its emphasis on the authority of scripture (sola scriptura) and salvation by faith alone (sola fide), came to England as a result of Henry VIII’s insistence on divorcing his wife, Catherine of Aragon, against the wishes of the Pope.
• A female monarch in a male world, Elizabeth ruled through a combination of adroit political maneuvering and imperious command, enhancing her authority by means of an extraordinary cult of love.
• Renaissance literature is the product of a rhetorical culture, a culture steeped in the arts of persuasion and trained to process complex verbal signals.
• Around 1590, an extraordinary change came over English drama, pioneered by Marlowe’s mastery of unrhymed iambic pentameter, or blank verse.

Summaries:

The English language had almost no prestige abroad at the beginning of the sixteenth century. One of the earliest sixteenth-century works of English literature, Thomas More's Utopia, was written in Latin for an international intellectual community. It was only translated into English during the 1550s, nearly a half-century after its original publication in Britain. By 1600, though English remained somewhat peripheral on the continent, it had been transformed into an immensely powerful expressive medium, as employed by Shakespeare, Marlowe, and the translators of the Bible.

The development of the English language is linked to the consolidation and strengthening of the English state. The Wars of the Roses ended with Henry VII’s establishment of the Tudor dynasty that would rule England from 1485 to 1603. The Tudors imposed a much stronger central authority on the nation. The royal court was a center of culture as well as power, finding expression in theater, masques, fashion, and taste in painting, music, and poetry. The court fostered paranoia, and in this anxious atmosphere courtiers became highly practiced at crafting and deciphering graceful words with double or triple meanings. For advice on the cultivation and display of the self, they turned to Castiglione's Il Cortigiano (The Courtier). Beyond the court, London was the largest and fastest-growing city in Europe, and literacy increased throughout the century, in part due to the influence of Protestantism as well as the rise of the printing press. Freedom of the press did not exist, and much literature, especially poetry, still circulated in manuscript.

The movement now known as the Renaissance unleashed new ideas and new social, political and economic forces that gradually displaced the spiritual and communal values of the Middle Ages. The Renaissance came to England through the spiritual and intellectual orientation known as humanism. Humanism, whose adherents included Sir Thomas More, John Colet, Roger Ascham, and Sir Thomas Elyot, was bound up with struggles over the purposes of education and curriculum reform. Education was still ordered according to the medieval trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric) and quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astrology, and music), and it emphasized Latin, the language of diplomacy, professions, and higher learning. But the focus of education shifted from training for the Church to the general acquisition of “literature,” in the sense both of literacy and of cultural knowledge.

Officially at least, England in the early sixteenth century had a single religion, Catholicism. The Protestant Reformation, with its emphasis on the authority of scripture (sola scriptura) and salvation by faith alone (sola fide), came to England as a result of Henry VIII’s insistence on divorcing his wife, Catherine of Aragon, against the wishes of the Pope. Henry declared himself supreme head of the Church of England (through the Act of Supremacy). Those like Thomas More who refused the oath acknowledging the king’s supremacy were held guilty of treason and executed. Henry was an equal-opportunity persecutor, hostile to Catholics and zealous reformers alike. His son Edward VI was more firmly Protestant, whilst Mary I was a Catholic. Elizabeth I, though a Protestant, was cautiously conservative, determined to hold religious zealotry in check.

A female monarch in a male world, Elizabeth ruled through a combination of adroit political maneuvering and imperious command, enhancing her authority by means of an extraordinary cult of love. The court moved in an atmosphere of romance, with music, dancing, plays, and masques. Leading artists like the poet Edmund Spenser and the miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard celebrated Elizabeth’s mystery and likened her to various classical goddesses. A source of intense anxiety was Mary Queen of Scots, a Catholic with a plausible claim to the English throne, whom Elizabeth eventually had executed. When England faced an invasion from Catholic Spain in 1588, Elizabeth appeared in person before her troops wearing a white gown and a silver breastplate; the incident testifies to her self-consciously theatrical command of the grand public occasion as well as her strategic appropriation of masculine qualities. By the 1590s, virtually everyone was aware that Elizabeth’s life was nearing an end, and there was great anxiety surrounding the succession to the throne.

Renaissance literature is the product of a rhetorical culture, a culture steeped in the arts of persuasion and trained to process complex verbal signals. Aesthetically, Elizabethan literature reveals a delight in order and pattern conjoined with a profound interest in the mind and heart. In his Defense of Poesy, Sir Philip Sidney argued that poetry’s magical power to create perfect worlds was also a moral power, encouraging readers to virtue. The major literary modes of the Elizabethan period included pastoral, as exemplified in Marlowe’s The Passionate Shepherd to his Love, andheroic/epic, as in Spenser’s Faerie Queene.

A permanent, freestanding public theater in England dates only from 1567. There was, however, a rich and vital theatrical tradition, including interludes and mystery and morality plays. Around 1590, an extraordinary change came over English drama, pioneered by Marlowe’s mastery of unrhymed iambic pentameter, or blank verse. The theaters had many enemies; moralists warned that they were nests of sedition, and Puritans charged that theatrical transvestism excited illicit sexual desires, both heterosexual and homosexual. Nonetheless, the playing companies had powerful allies, including Queen Elizabeth, and continuing popular support.

• Adapted from The Norton Anthology of English Literature

In the tale, or "story of incident," the focus of interest is on the course and outcome of the events, as in Edgar Allan Poe's The Gold Bug (1843) and in other tales of detection, in many of the stories of O. Henry (1862-1910), and in the stock but sometimes well-contrived western and adventure stories in popular magazines. "Stories of character" focus instead on the state of mind and motivation, or on the psychological and moral qualities, of the protagonists. In some of the stories of character by Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), the Russian master of the form, nothing more happens than an encounter and conversation between two people. Ernest Hemingway's classic "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" consists only of a curt conversation between two waiters about an old man who each day gets drunk and stays on in the café until it closes, followed by a brief meditation on the part of one of the waiters. In some stories there is a balance of interest between external action and character. Hemingway's "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" is as violent in its packed events as any sensational adventure-tale, but every particular of the action and dialogue is contrived to test and reveal, with a surprising set of reversals,the moral quality of all three protagonists.

The short story differs from the novel in the dimension that Aristotle called "magnitude," and this limitation of length imposes differences both in the effects that the story can achieve and in the choice, elaboration, and management of the elements to achieve those effects. Edgar Allan Poe, who is sometimes called the originator of the short story as an established genre, was at any rate its first critical theorist. He defined what he called "the prose tale" as a narrative which can be read at one sitting of from half an hour to two hours, and is limited to "a certain unique or single effect" to which every detail is subordinate (Review of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice Told Tales, 1842). Poe's comment applies to many short stories, and points to the economy of management which the tightness of the form always imposes in some degree. We can say that, by and large, the short story writer introduces a very limited number of persons, cannot afford the space for the leisurely analysis and sustained development of character, and cannot undertake to develop as dense and detailed a social milieu as does the novelist. The author often begins the story close to, or even on the verge of, the climax, minimizes both prior exposition and the details of the setting, keeps the complications down, and clears up the denouement quickly—sometimes in a few sentences. (See plot) The central incident is often selected to manifest as much as possible of the protagonist's life and character, and the details are devised to carry maximum import for the development of the plot. This spareness in the narrative often gives the artistry in a good short story higher visibility than the artistry in the more capacious and loosely structured novel.

Many distinguished short stories depart from this paradigm in various ways. It must be remembered that the name covers a great diversity of prose fiction, all the way from the short short story, which is a slightly elaborated anecdote of perhaps five hundred words, to such long and complex forms as Herman Melville's Billy Budd (c. 1890), Henry James' The Turn of the Screw (1898), Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902), and Thomas Mann's Mano and the Magician (1930). In such works, the status of middle length between the tautness of the short story and the expansiveness of the novel is sometimes indicated by the name novelette, or novella. This form has been especially exploited in Germany (where it is called the Novelle) after it was introduced by Goethe in 1795 and carried on by Heinrich von Kleist and many other writers; the genre has also been the subject of special critical attention by German theorists (see the list of readings below).

The short narrative, in both verse and prose, is one of the oldest and most widespread of literary forms; the Hebrew Bible, for example, includes the stories of Jonah, Ruth, and Esther. Some of the narrative types which preceded the modern short story, treated elsewhere in this Glossary, are the fable, the exemplum, the folktale, the fabliau, and the parable. Early in its history, there developed the device of the frame-story: a preliminary narrative within which one or more of the characters proceeds to tell a series of short narratives. This device was widespread in the oral and written literature of the East and Middle East, as in the collection of stories called The Arabian Nights, and was used by a number of other writers, including Boccaccio for his prose Decameron (1353) and by Chaucer for his versified Canterbury Tales (c. 1387). In the latter instance, Chaucer developed the frame-story of the journey, dialogue, and interactions of the Canterbury pilgrims to such a degree that the frame itself approximated the form of an organized plot. Within Chaucer's frame-plot, each story constitutes a complete and rounded narrative, yet functions also both as a means of characterizing the teller and as a vehicle for the quarrels and topics of argument en route. In its more recent forms, the frame-story may enclose either a single narrative (Henry James' The Turn of the Saew) or a sequence of narratives (Joel Chandler Harris' stories as told by Uncle Remus, 1881 and later; see under beast fable).

The form of prose narrative which approximates the present concept of the short story was developed, beginning in the early nineteenth century, in order to satisfy the need for short fiction by the many magazines (periodical collections of diverse materials, including essays, reviews, verses, and prose stories) that were inaugurated at that time. Among the early practitioners were Washington Irving, Hawthorne, and Poe in America, Sir Walter Scott and Mary Shelley in England, E. T. A. Hoffmann in Germany, Balzac in France, and Gogol, Pushkin, and Turgenev in Russia. Since then, almost all the major novelists in all the European languages have also written notable short stories. The form has flourished especially in America; Frank O'Connor has called it "the national art form," and its American masters include (in addition to the writers mentioned above) Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, John O'Hara, J. F. Powers, John Cheever, and J. D. Salinger.

See H. S. Canby, The Short Story in English (1909); Sean O'Faolain, The Short Story (1948, reprinted 1964); Frank O'Connor, The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story (1962); R. L. Pattee, The Development of the American Short Story (rev. 1966); Julie Brown, ed., American Women Short Story Writers (1995). On the novella: Ronald Paulson, The Novelette Before 1900 (1968); Mary Doyle Springer, Forms of the Modem Novella (1976); Martin Swales, The German Novelle (1977). On the frame-story and tales in the ancient collection of Arabic stories, see the Introduction to The Arabian Nights, trans. Husain Haddawy (1990).