Short Story As Literary Genre

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The idea behind the short story genre is to convey a message or a point to the reader in a small amount of words. Determining the length of a “proper” short story is difficult, a simple and classic definition of this genre would be that one should be able to read the whole story in one sitting, alone. Unlike the novel, every part of a short story is important and they also tend to be less complex than novels. They focus on one of everything; incident, plot, setting, the time period is shorter and the number of characters is smaller. Short stories may or may not follow the pattern that longer forms of fiction do, usually they have an abrupt beginning and endings. Short stories, at first, had their face in “oral story-telling traditions” which meant that they were narratives told orally. These were told in the form of rhyming and made it easier for the story-teller to recall and maybe even adapt the story at the spur of the moment. There are two ancient forms of short stories, fables and anecdote. Fables were also called Parables; these were tales that had a moral perspective to convey and were said to have been invented by a Greek slave named Aesop in the 6th Century BC. The other form, the Anecdote, was very popular under the Roman Empire and they functioned as somewhat a parable. The stories were brief, realistic and expressed a point. Many of these Roman anecdotes were collected in the 13th and 14th century and also remained popular in Europe well into the 18th century. By the early 14th century, in Europe, the oral story-telling tradition, begun to change and developed into written stories. The mid-17th century in France gave way to the rise of a refined short novel, the “nouvelle” and by the 1690s fairy tales began to be published which, as we all know, fit the criteria of short stories (short and brief, moral and ethical point – good triumphs over evil,

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