Conte cruel
The conte cruel is, as The A to Z of Fantasy Literature by
Contes cruels ("Cruel Tales"), a two-volume set of about 150 tales and short stories by the 19th-century French writer Octave Mirbeau, collected and edited by Pierre Michel
and Jean-François Nivet and published in two volumes in 1990 by Librairie Séguier.
Some noted writers in the conte cruel genre are
Tales of the Unexpected. H. P. Lovecraft observed of Level's fiction in his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927): "This type, however, is less a part of the weird tradition than a class peculiar to itself—the so-called conte cruel, in which the wrenching of the emotions is accomplished through dramatic tantalizations, frustrations, and gruesome physical horrors".[3]
Brian M. Stableford has observed that, by the 1980s, the conte cruel was the standard narrative form of soft science fiction,[4] in particular the works of Thomas M. Disch and John Sladek.[4]
See also
- Anthology
- Drabble
- Flash fiction (also called microfiction)
- Irish short story
- Literary journal
- Minisaga
- Sketch story
- Tall tale
- Vignette
References
- ISBN 978-0-8108-6345-3.
- ^ François Riviere, "Patricia Highsmith a rejoint les eaux profondes" Libération, 6 February 1995. Retrieved 13 January 2018.
- ISBN 978-9949-9424-4-2.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-8108-4938-9.