Fiction has the potential to bring the climate crisis into the imagination and help readers understand and respond to climate change. From speculative ‘cli-fi’ to contemporary eco fiction, literary responses to climate change vary greatly...
In the 21st century, the demands of digital presence and the distractions of the internet simultaneously challenge writers wishing to represent contemporary life and threaten the attention readers are willing to give to literature. In...
The twenty-three stories in the original version of Frederick Philip Grove’s Tales from the Margin comprise a cycle: characters recur and the locale is limited to Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Alberta: the Canadian Prairies. This paper...
This article explores the phenomenon of character migration in one of Alice Munro’s early works, Lives of Girls and Women from 1971. Munro vitally maintains the typical structure of the modern Anglo-American short story, with its tendency...
Excerpt: The short story cycle, often relegated to the margin of literary studies, offers a pertinent example of a nomadic genre. Because it resists definition, it inhabits a liminal space straddling the short story and...
This essay attempts to contribute to the ongoing critical discussion on theshort story-cycle and its tradition within the framework of emergent contemporary American literatures, more specifically American writings with a Portuguese ethnic resonance. The collection...
In this article I analyse Vimala Devi’s Monção (1963) as a short-story cycle, a genre that differs as much from the traditional novel as from non-integrated collections of short narratives in its “tension between variety...
This essay considers how collective memory works to develop and sustain a group identity in Gloria Naylor’s 1980 novel, The Women of Brewster Place. Using post-structural theorist Bronwyn Davies’s collective biography project as a model...
This article argues that David Vann’s Legend of a Suicide (2008) offers us a culturally significant exploration of hegemonic theories around how we understand, or are said to understand, the temporality of trauma, its effect upon identity...
First paragraphs: The use of absence in the short story cycle is an overlooked but vital element of the genre.1 It contributes to the way that cycles can manipulate the focus in their stories, using...
First paragraphs: Text and film are typically framed by liminal spaces or borders where the reader or viewer enters and/or leaves the narrative world, i.e. openings and endings. Generally speaking, openings introduce the reader to...
In lieu of an (English) abstract here are the first paragraphs: In The Promise of Happiness, Sara Ahmed observes that hegemonic notions of happiness are associated both with a sense of belonging to a community...