A Study Of The British Short Story From The Perspective Of Space

The British short story forms a unique tradition. With an elastic form, the short story can effectively record the fleeting social and cultural phenomena, the fragmented modern life, as well as the author’s ephemeral feeling, which renders it an essential part of British writers’career. The literature review, however, indicates the shortage of British short story criticism, which either scatters in the gross study of the European short stories, or buries itself in the diachronic study, resulting therefore in almost a dearth of criticism on the spatial features so characteristic of the form. In view of lack of concentrated relevant critical efforts in existing studies, this dissertaton seeks to examine the British short story from the perspective of space and attempts to reveal its distinctive genre traits. The dissertation is divided into four chapters. The first chapter clarifies the scope of the present study, including, among others, the definition of the short story, an overview of British short stories’historical development, the space dimensions of short story study. The following three chapters analyze how different spaces affect British short stories and shape their unique genre traits, in terms of concrete media space, abstract cultural and geographical space and aesthetic narrative space. Firstly, the media space.gives rise to short story’s immediacy, ephemerality and brevity. Secondly, the British short story tends to concentrate on a cultural and geographical space marked by miniaturization, marginalization and heterodoxy, resisting as it were the British empire’mainstream narrative and cultural ideology propagandizing expansion, centralilty, order, and domination. Thirdly, by gathering up the scattered pieces, the short stories swerve from the traditional linear narrative and present a spatial form. In conclusion, this study points out that the British short story enjoys various spatial features, which is very significant to the further expansion of British short story study.