Subversive Storyteller: The Short Story Cycle and the Politics of Identity in America

The Subversive Storyteller: The Short Story Cycle and the Politics of Identity in America examines how nineteenth- and twentieth-century American authors adapted and expanded the short story cycle to convey subversive or controversial ideas without alienating readers and threatening their ability to succeed within the literary marketplace. The twelve authors highlighted here come from a wide range of cultural, racial, and geographic backgrounds. Their texts represent different, more advanced stages in the development of the short story cycle as each exploits the fragmentation and inherent lack of cohesion of the genre to reflect the changing realities of life in America during key moments in its history. In tracing the development of the short story cycle through the first two centuries of America's literary tradition, The Subversive Storyteller fills a gap in existing scholarship on the genre. It examines how short story cycles by Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sarah Orne Jewett, Charles W. Chesnutt, Willa Cather, Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Raymond Carver, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Louise Erdrich are held together, the publication history of each text (the parts as well as the whole), the revisions made by both authors and editors, and the state of the literary profession at the time each was written.