A comprehensive overview of the English short story, charting its origins and development through to the present day.

List of contributors; Acknowledgements; Introduction Dominic Head; 1. Early modern diversity: the origins of English short fiction Barbara Korte; 2. Short prose narratives of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Donald J. Newman; 3. Gothic and Victorian supernatural tales Jessica Cox; 4. The Victorian potboiler: novelists writing short stories Sophie Gilmartin; 5. Fable, myth and folktale: the writing of oral and traditional story forms Andrew Harrison; 6. The colonial short story, adventure and the exotic Robert Hampson; 7. The Yellow Book circle and the culture of the literary magazine Winnie Chan; 8. The modernist short story: fractured perspectives Claire Drewery; 9. War stories: the short story in World Wars I and II Ann-Marie Einhaus; 10. The short story in Ireland to 1945: a national literature Heather Ingman; 11. The short story in Ireland since 1945: a modernizing tradition Heather Ingman; 12. The short story in Scotland: from oral tale to dialectal style Timothy C. Baker; 13. The short story in Wales: cultivated regionalism Jane Aaron; 14. The understated art, English style Dean Baldwin; 15. The rural tradition in the English short story Dominic Head; 16. Metropolitan modernity: stories of London Neal Alexander; 17. Gender and genre: short fiction, feminism and female experience Sabine Coelsch-Foisner; 18. Queer short stories: an inverted history Brett Josef Grubisic and Carellin Brooks; 19. Stories of Jewish identity: survivors, exiles and cosmopolitans Axel Stähler; 20. New voices: multicultural short stories Abigail Ward; 21. Settler stories: postcolonial short fiction Victoria Kuttainen; 22. After Empire: postcolonial short fiction and the oral tradition John Thieme; 23. Ghost stories and supernatural tales Ruth Robbins; 24. The detective story: order from chaos Andrew Maunder; 25. Frontiers: science fiction and the British marketplace Paul March-Russell; 26. Weird stories: the potency of horror and fantasy Roger Luckhurst; 27. Experimentalism: self-reflexive and postmodernist stories David James; 28. Satirical stories: estrangement and social critique Sandie Byrne; 29. Comedic short fiction Richard Bradford; 30. Short story cycles: between the novel and the story collection Gerald Lynch; 31. The novella: between the novel and the story Gerri Kimber; 32. The short story visualized: adaptations and screenplays Linda Costanzo Cahir; 33. The short story anthology: shaping the canon Lynda Prescott; 34. The institution of creative writing Ailsa Cox; 35. Short story futures Julian Murphet; Bibliography; Index.