Short Story as World Literature : The Deep History and Modern Lives of an Impure Genre

Global in scope, this volume uncovers the deep history of the short story as an "impure" genre by challenging the commonplace understanding in contemporary literary studies that the short story is primarily a product of Western modernity. Genres do not have rigid, timeless, once-and-for-all definitions, and the short story is no exception.Short Story as World Literature invites the reader to reflect on the historical becoming of this impure genre, analyzing various forms of the short story throughout its deep history.It also challenges established ideas about the genre that limit its history to the prose form practiced by Edgar Allan Poe and canonized in Western Europe following Charles Baudelaire’s influential translation. The story of the short story presented here goes into a much deeper history throughout time and space: its earliest forms include dreams and visions in ancient religious texts, parables, poems, maxims, but also more recently poem-objects and films.The authors examin