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The realist short story of the powerful glimpse : Chekhov to Carver / Kerry McSweeney.

By: McSweeney, Kerry, 1941-Material type: TextTextPublisher: Columbia : University of South Carolina Press, c2007Description: xii, 136 p. ; 24 cmISBN: 9781570036958 (cloth : alk. paper); 1570036950 (cloth : alk. paper)Subject(s): Chekov, Anton -- Criticism and interpretation | Joyce, James -- Criticism and interpretation | Hemingway, Ernest -- Criticism and interpretation | O'Connor, Flannery -- Criticism and interpretation | Carver, Raymond -- Criticism and interpretation | Realism in literature | Literature, Modern -- 19th century -- History and criticism | Literature, Modern -- 20th century -- History and criticism | Short storyDDC classification: 809.3/10912 LOC classification: PN3340 | .M37 2007
Contents:
Aesthetic readings of Chekhov's stories -- Joyce's "Stories of my childhood" and cultural studies -- Affects in Hemingway's Nick Adams sequence -- O'Connor's Christian realism -- Carver's dark view of things.
Review: "Taking an aesthetic approach to the genre of realist short fiction, Kerry McSweeney clusters the work of five masters - Anton Chekhov, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Flannery O'Connor, and Raymond Carver - to offer a poetics of the form for students and scholars. At the center of this argument is the notion that the realist short story is a glimpse - powerful and tightly focused - into a world that the writer must precisely craft and in which the reader must fully invest."--BOOK JACKET.
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Stacks - 3rd Floor 		PN3340 .M37 2007 (Browse shelf) Available 0000001938372

Includes bibliographical references (p. [123]-131) and index.

Aesthetic readings of Chekhov's stories -- Joyce's "Stories of my childhood" and cultural studies -- Affects in Hemingway's Nick Adams sequence -- O'Connor's Christian realism -- Carver's dark view of things.

"Taking an aesthetic approach to the genre of realist short fiction, Kerry McSweeney clusters the work of five masters - Anton Chekhov, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Flannery O'Connor, and Raymond Carver - to offer a poetics of the form for students and scholars. At the center of this argument is the notion that the realist short story is a glimpse - powerful and tightly focused - into a world that the writer must precisely craft and in which the reader must fully invest."--BOOK JACKET.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

This book is a rare find. McSweeney (McGill Univ.) examines the short fiction of Anton Chekhov, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Flannery O'Connor, and Raymond Carver because all are "committed to the realist representation of experience" and believe in "the importance and efficacy of the short-fiction form." Most studies of short fiction deal with individual stories (and appear in journals) or examine individual authors. Two notable exceptions are Short Story Theory at a Crossroads (CH, Jun'90, 27-5598), ed. by Susan Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey, and The New Short Story Theories, ed. by Charles May (1994); the present volume differs from these in that McSweeney works "to develop an aesthetic model" for analyzing distinctive features of short stories "as an alternative to theory-driven interpretive models." His approach is convincing: it works for dealing with specific features of individual stories and also for providing bases for making comparisons for a form "more lyric than plot-driven and more spatial than linear." McSweeney's prose is clear and free of obfuscating terminology; his ideas are sharply delineated; his scholarship is current and relevant. The list of sources is extraordinarily useful. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty. T. Loe SUNY Oswego

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