The Art of Brevity offers an international, inclusive exploration of the steadily growing field of short story studies. Contributors weave together themes of time, space, compression, mystery, reader response, and narrative closure. They discuss writers as varied as Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Sarah Orne Jewett, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemingway, Mavis Gallant, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, and Robert Olen Butler. Among the less familiar topics they investigate are the Australian tall tale, the nineteenth-century queer...

This introductory book presents key concepts of narrative theory (or "narratology") and analyses five prose texts--the parable of the sower in St. Mark's Gospel, Franz Kafka's The Trial, James Joyce's 'The Dead', Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse--by applying the principles of narrative theory. This book also discusses film versions of four of these texts: Orson Welles's The Trial, John Huston's The Dead, Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, and Colin Gregg's To the Lighthouse. By lucidly presenting the concepts of narrative theory and illustrating...