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Foreword

Linda Collinge et Emmanuel Vernadakis
p. 11-12

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1The ten essays of the forty-fifth issue of the Journal of the Short Story in English deal with nineteenth and twentieth century English, Irish and American stories by W. Collins, A. Conan Doyle, Saki, V.S. Pritchett, Ian McEwan, A. S. Byatt, Jeanette Winterson, George Moore, Flannery O’Connor, Nabokov and Sherman Alexie.

2In “Failed Detectives and Dangerous Females” Ellen Harrington studies the gender complications that occur in W. Collins’s and A. Conan Doyle’s stories when detectives interact with women in the household.  

3Ruth Maxey, in “Children are Given Us to Discourage our Better Instincts”: The Paradoxical Treatment of Children in Saki’s Short Fiction,” examines Saki’s portrayal of adult behaviour towards children, the complicities between animals and children in his work, the child’s secret world or private psychic sphere, and the ways in which his literary technique supports these depictions in order to clarify the reason why Saki both challenges and upholds the cruel treatment of children by adults.

4In his essay “Revision as Transformation: The Making and Re-making of V.S. Pritchett’s ‘You Make Your Own Life,’ Jonathan Bloom focuses on one short story to permit a comprehensive analysis of the additions and deletions, from autograph manuscript to final typescript. He shows how Pritchett fashioned his stories through a long process of writing, re-writing, and revising in order to achieve his intended effect.

5Richard Pedot’s working hypothesis in his essay “My Tongue Did Things by Itself: Story-Telling/Story-Writing in ‘Conversation with a Cupboard Man’” is that “McEwan’s deconstruction of the oral/textual antinomy—and by the same token of realism in fiction—has to be approached in relation to the stories’ specific challenge: that of handing narration over to people usually deprived of speech—because of intellectual incapacity and/or because their right to speak is queried on moral grounds.”

6In “A Tapestry of Riddling Links: Universal Contiguity in A.S. Bayatt’s ‘Arachne’” Maria J. Martinez describes Byatt’s work as a tapestry woven with multiple but interconnected threads. It reads, she explains, like a mixed-genre narrative that manages to give the reader a glimpse of those recurrent patterns associated with myths that some writers are still able to retell in stories that are always the same and always different.  

7In “Earthly Men and Otherwordly Women: Gender Types in Jeannette Winterson’s ‘Atlantic Crossing,’” Carla A. Arnell studies Winterson’s complex representation of religion in a story from Winterson’s first short story collection which captures that complexity.

8Richard Rankin Russell suggests in “Escaping the Examined Life in George Moore’s ‘Homesickness’” that “Home Sickness” is better understood as an imaginative critique of urban modernity, the pace and materialism of which Moore felt undermined the conditions needed for a contemplative mindset.

9In “The Stained-Glass Man: Word and Icon in Flannery O’Connor’s ‘Parker’s Back,’” Michel Feith studies the iconicity of O’Connor’s writing. The short story is viewed as an ideological and aesthetic testament, revolving around a negotiation between Word and Icon. From the religious icon represented in the text, the essay shifts to the text as icon, in a self-reflexive mise-en-abîme of the visual dimension of the whole of O’Connor’s œuvre, insofar as it concentrates meaning in an “anagogical” way.

10In “History and Denial in Nabokov’s ‘Conversation Piece, 1945,’” Tim Conley uses Nabokov’s favourite theme of the double to question the narrator’s self-declared “liberal” position as he recounts his seemingly accidental encounter with genteel Holocaust deniers. His essay offers a reading of “Conversation Piece, 1945” which reconsiders the political and ideological connotations of what it means to call a fiction “Nabokovian.”

11In her essay, “L’écriture rouge de Sherman Alexie : l’exemple de ‘The Sin Eaters’” Diane Sabatier analyses Alexie’s story as a macabre allegory in which, by linking the holocaust to the genocide of the Native American tribes, the writer reflects on some of the greatest interrogations of philosophy and literature.

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Linda Collinge et Emmanuel Vernadakis, « Foreword »Journal of the Short Story in English, 45 | 2005, 11-12.

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Linda Collinge et Emmanuel Vernadakis, « Foreword »Journal of the Short Story in English [En ligne], 45 | Autumn 2005, mis en ligne le 01 septembre 2005, consulté le 28 mars 2024. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/446

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Linda Collinge

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Emmanuel Vernadakis

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