Short story cycle
A short story cycle (sometimes referred to as a story sequence or composite novel)
Definitional debates
Scholars have pointed out that there is a wide range of possibilities that fall between simple collections and novels in their most-commonly understood form. One question is how well the stories stand up individually: chapters of a novel usually cannot stand alone, whereas stories in collections are meant to be fully independent. But many books have combined stories in such a way that the stories have varying degrees of interdependence, and it is these variations that cause problems in definition. Maggie Dunn and Ann Morris, for instance, claim that the stories in a story cycle are more independent than those in a composite novel,
History
In their study of the genre, Maggie Dunn and Ann Morris note that the form descends from two different traditions: There are texts that are themselves assembled from other texts, such as the way the tales from the
J. Gerald Kennedy describes the proliferation of the genre in the twentieth century, attributing it in part to the desire "to renounce the organizing authority of an omniscient narrator, asserting instead a variety of voices or perspectives reflective of the radical subjectivity of modern experience. Kennedy finds this proliferation in keeping with
The composite novel
Dunn and Morris list several methods that authors use to provide unity to the collection as a whole. It has to be noted that these organising principles pertain to their theory of the composite novel as a short story collection where the focus lies on the coherent whole. (the examples are theirs): The organising principles
- a geographical area: The Country of the Pointed Firs, Dubliners, The Women of Brewster Place
- a central protagonist, which has the option of also being the narrator: Winesburg, Ohio, The Woman Warrior, A Certain Lucas
- a collective protagonist: In Our Time, Go Down, Moses, Love Medicine, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza
- patterns to create coherence: Three Lives, Exile and the Kingdom, The Golden Apples, A Yellow Raft in Blue Water
- focus on storytelling itself: The Way to Rainy Mountain, Pricksongs & Descants, How to Make an American Quilt
Multiple of these organizing principles may be used in order to create a composite novel.
Titles using cycle technique
- A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
- A Hero of Our Time
- A Sportsman's Sketches
- A Visit From the Goon Squad
- A Young Doctor's Notebook
- Annie John
- Black Swan Green
- Cane
- Cathedral
- The Conjure Woman
- The Country of the Pointed Firs
- Dark Avenues
- Dubliners
- The Finer Grain
- For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf
- Go Down, Moses
- The Golovlyov Family
- Hearts in Atlantis
- The House on Mango Street
- The Housebreaker of Shady Hill and Other Stories
- How the García Girls Lost Their Accents
- I, Robot
- In Our Time
- Jesus' Son
- The Joy Luck Club
- The Last of the Menu Girls
- Legends of the Province House
- Linmill Stories
- Lives of Girls and Women
- Love Medicine
- The Martian Chronicles
- Monkeys (novel)
- Mrs. Spring Fragrance
- Old Creole Days
- Olinger Stories
- Olive, Again
- Olive Kitteridge
- The Piazza Tales
- Pictures of Fidelman
- Pulp Fiction
- Red Cavalry
- Sinbad the Sailor
- The Candy House
- The Seven Wonders
- The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.
- The Things They Carried
- Three Lives
- Three Tales
- Uncle Tom's Children
- Until the Victim Becomes our Own
- The Watsons Go to Birmingham – 1963
- The Wide Net
- Winesburg, Ohio
- The Women of Brewster Place
References
- ^ Scholars are still debating the differences between these terms; see Nagel's introduction for an overview of the discussion.
- ISBN 0-313-25081-2.
- ^ Mann p.11
- ISBN 0-8020-3511-6.
- ^ Dunn and Morris p.5
- ISBN 0-8071-2660-8.
- ISBN 978-90-420-0692-8.
- ISBN 9781405101196.
- ISBN 0-8057-0966-5.
- ISBN 0-521-43010-0.
- ISBN 0-8153-2105-8.