Summary of Chapter One
Origins: From Folk-Tale to Art-Tale
Book: The Short Story: An Introduction
by Paul March-Russell, 2009
________________________________________________________________
Universidade Federal do Ceará
DELILT - Centro de Humanidades
Literatura em Língua Inglesa I
Prof.ª Lola Aronovich
2018.1
________________________________________________________
Paul March-Russel begins telling us that the earliest recorded references to the term "short story" is from the Oxford English Dictionary, in the late eighteenth century. Subsequently, Anthony Tropole, Wilkie Collins, Raymond Williams, are cited as writers from that time that had also used the term. The coinage of the new name was grounded in the late nineteenth century, given the fact that there was a need to represent in language a cultural change, a shift in consciousness in society. In effect, some writers seemed to reject the new term to define their pieces of writing. Hence, they stood referring to the genre as tales, fables or even just stories.
In the last years of the nineteenth century, there was much debate and confusion about the nature of the short story. In the early twentieth century, critics such as Brander Matthews identified that many works had failed to fit the prescriptions of the modern short story and indicated how the new form should be spelled. To clarify short story's artistic appeal, the article's author, March-Russel, traces prehistory of the structure. Afterward, he gives us an overview of "tale", considering five sub-genres: parable and fable, the Creation myth, novella, fairy tale and art-tale.
The parable is a type of storytelling that operates by analogy. The narrative may be fictional, and its aim to instruct the reader to a higher religious or moral purpose. The fables shares some similarities with parables, however, its significant differences are the endowment of animals and other natural elements with human qualities, a generalized sense of setting or place and the use of irony. As an example to the last tale's sub-genre, the author cites the Aesop's fables.
Creation Myths are the essence of almost all culture cosmology. It is a type of parable, but although formulated within a religious structure that considers the events to be necessarily real, the myth describes not only regarding moral order how the world came to be. They represent humanity's continued concern with origins: the search for identity and self-knowledge. To exemplify, the author brings up "The epic of Gilgamesh".
The term novella refers to a short novel, in its modern usage. In the nineteenth century, it was known as "novelette". Up until the end of the fourteenth century, according to Clements and Gibaldi (1977: 5), "a novella was a story that could be true or fictional, new or simply unusual, written or recited" (apud Paul March-Russell, 2009, pp. 5-6). For instance, the Middle Ages' tale collections, such as Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron (1349-50) and Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales (1387), are pieces of art that make use of these different characteristics.
The popularisation of the framed narrative influenced collectors of folktales such as Giovan Francesco e Straparola and Giambattista Basile by Boccaccio and Chaucer. In his collection, Straparola added riddles to the end of each tale instead of didactic messages. Basile elaborated tales such as "Cinderella", "Sleeping Beauty" and "Rapunzel" by overhearing and recording folktales from his servants and other poor. As he wrote for an aristocratic audience, he combined the references from lower and affluent class. Their tales would present moral observations but did not function as parables. Perspicacity, comedy, tragedy, violence and sexual openness co-existed in these pieces of art.
With the emergence of new writers such as Charles Perrault, who wrote "Stories and Tales of Times Past" (1697), the fairy tales became less explicit, smoother and more ordered narratives and the magical explanation of elements more logically. In that way, the genre tended to turn into moral and social instruction's vehicles, to become an instrument for the civilizing process of children, hence, progressively displaced from its folk origins.
Art-tales differ from fairy tales once that they can be read as social comments, the former is written with expressed artistic or political purpose in mind. As examples, the article's author brings Washington Irving, Charles Dickens, Nikolai Gogol, J. P. Hebel and Oscar Wilde. March-Russel concludes that, art-tale sub-genre as "an important development since it bridges the gap between the folktale and the modern short story."
For further reading, March-Russel indicates the chapter two from the book "The Short Story" (1977) by Ian Reid, for a sketch of the short story from its ancient origins. Regarding folktale and fairy tale, we are shown a formalist study by Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folk-Tale" (1968), and a psychoanalytic approach by Bruno Bettelheim, "The Uses of Enchantment" (1976) respectively. For a critical anthology, the book "The Great Fairy Tale Tradition," edited by Jack Zipes in 2001. On the art-tale, he indicates a piece written by Kari Lokke entitled "The Romantic Fairy Tale", that is in Michael Ferber's book "Companion to European Romanticism" (2005). For a reading on the genre, the author suggests Jacques Derrida's essay "The Law of Genre", in "Acts of Literature" (1992).
Origins: From Folk-Tale to Art-Tale
Book: The Short Story: An Introduction
by Paul March-Russell, 2009
________________________________________________________________
Universidade Federal do Ceará
DELILT - Centro de Humanidades
Literatura em Língua Inglesa I
Prof.ª Lola Aronovich
2018.1
________________________________________________________
Paul March-Russel begins telling us that the earliest recorded references to the term "short story" is from the Oxford English Dictionary, in the late eighteenth century. Subsequently, Anthony Tropole, Wilkie Collins, Raymond Williams, are cited as writers from that time that had also used the term. The coinage of the new name was grounded in the late nineteenth century, given the fact that there was a need to represent in language a cultural change, a shift in consciousness in society. In effect, some writers seemed to reject the new term to define their pieces of writing. Hence, they stood referring to the genre as tales, fables or even just stories.
In the last years of the nineteenth century, there was much debate and confusion about the nature of the short story. In the early twentieth century, critics such as Brander Matthews identified that many works had failed to fit the prescriptions of the modern short story and indicated how the new form should be spelled. To clarify short story's artistic appeal, the article's author, March-Russel, traces prehistory of the structure. Afterward, he gives us an overview of "tale", considering five sub-genres: parable and fable, the Creation myth, novella, fairy tale and art-tale.
The parable is a type of storytelling that operates by analogy. The narrative may be fictional, and its aim to instruct the reader to a higher religious or moral purpose. The fables shares some similarities with parables, however, its significant differences are the endowment of animals and other natural elements with human qualities, a generalized sense of setting or place and the use of irony. As an example to the last tale's sub-genre, the author cites the Aesop's fables.
Creation Myths are the essence of almost all culture cosmology. It is a type of parable, but although formulated within a religious structure that considers the events to be necessarily real, the myth describes not only regarding moral order how the world came to be. They represent humanity's continued concern with origins: the search for identity and self-knowledge. To exemplify, the author brings up "The epic of Gilgamesh".
The term novella refers to a short novel, in its modern usage. In the nineteenth century, it was known as "novelette". Up until the end of the fourteenth century, according to Clements and Gibaldi (1977: 5), "a novella was a story that could be true or fictional, new or simply unusual, written or recited" (apud Paul March-Russell, 2009, pp. 5-6). For instance, the Middle Ages' tale collections, such as Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron (1349-50) and Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales (1387), are pieces of art that make use of these different characteristics.
The popularisation of the framed narrative influenced collectors of folktales such as Giovan Francesco e Straparola and Giambattista Basile by Boccaccio and Chaucer. In his collection, Straparola added riddles to the end of each tale instead of didactic messages. Basile elaborated tales such as "Cinderella", "Sleeping Beauty" and "Rapunzel" by overhearing and recording folktales from his servants and other poor. As he wrote for an aristocratic audience, he combined the references from lower and affluent class. Their tales would present moral observations but did not function as parables. Perspicacity, comedy, tragedy, violence and sexual openness co-existed in these pieces of art.
With the emergence of new writers such as Charles Perrault, who wrote "Stories and Tales of Times Past" (1697), the fairy tales became less explicit, smoother and more ordered narratives and the magical explanation of elements more logically. In that way, the genre tended to turn into moral and social instruction's vehicles, to become an instrument for the civilizing process of children, hence, progressively displaced from its folk origins.
Art-tales differ from fairy tales once that they can be read as social comments, the former is written with expressed artistic or political purpose in mind. As examples, the article's author brings Washington Irving, Charles Dickens, Nikolai Gogol, J. P. Hebel and Oscar Wilde. March-Russel concludes that, art-tale sub-genre as "an important development since it bridges the gap between the folktale and the modern short story."
For further reading, March-Russel indicates the chapter two from the book "The Short Story" (1977) by Ian Reid, for a sketch of the short story from its ancient origins. Regarding folktale and fairy tale, we are shown a formalist study by Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folk-Tale" (1968), and a psychoanalytic approach by Bruno Bettelheim, "The Uses of Enchantment" (1976) respectively. For a critical anthology, the book "The Great Fairy Tale Tradition," edited by Jack Zipes in 2001. On the art-tale, he indicates a piece written by Kari Lokke entitled "The Romantic Fairy Tale", that is in Michael Ferber's book "Companion to European Romanticism" (2005). For a reading on the genre, the author suggests Jacques Derrida's essay "The Law of Genre", in "Acts of Literature" (1992).
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