The American Short Story Cycle

Front matter

THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY CYCLE

Jennifer J. Smith

Jennifer J. Smith

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Forming Provisional Identities 1. Locating the Short Story Cycle

ON Sh gee 22

Introduction

Forming Provisional Identities

H. L. Mencken, a clamorous advocate for modern American literature, remarked of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919) that ‘nothing quite like it is to be found in our literature’ (qtd in Mann 1989: 163). Of Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time (1925), Edmund Wilson wrote that ‘in the dry composed little vignettes . . . [Hemingway] has almost invented a form of his own’ (qtd in Mann 1989: 163). Malcolm Cowley claimed that William Faulkner’s Knight’s Gambit (1949) ‘belongs to a genre that Faulkner has made peculiarly his own by the artistic success of such earlier volumes as The Unvanquished and Go Down, Moses’ (qtd in Mann 1989: ix). These three titans of early twentieth-century criticism claimed for each author the invention of a genre. They celebrated each book as utterly original. Each time a volume of loosely connected short stories appeared, critics and tastemakers heralded it as unlike anything that had come before.

Several possible explanations arise for their claiming the genre for each author, even among Anderson, Hemingway, and Faulkner, who clearly read and responded to each other. A fair amount of boosterism pervades critical responses to modernist texts, and more than a fair share recurs in authorial statements about creation and originality. In an era that held Ezra Pound’s injunction to ‘make it new’ as sacrosanct of a modernist commitment to innovation, genre promises one such avenue for invention. By writing in an unfamiliar genre that echoes the uncertainties and ambiguities of modernity, each author could theoretically be crowned the originator of a form. These books were unlike the novels and short stories readers were most familiar with, and reading them smacked of a sense of revelation and liberation. Although these authors did not invent a genre, it matters that they seemed to. The boasting reveals that these volumes somehow captured elemental truths about modernity. The disjointed, recursive form of volumes like Winesburg, In Our Time, and Knights Gambit represents the contingency and flux of modern life. This form, the short story cycle, composed of autonomous yet interconnected stories, is a persistent force in and on American fiction — before, during, and after the height of modernism.

The short story cycle gets claimed as new in each period, crystallising how much originality has mattered as a measure of greatness throughout literary history. Critical and popular reception of short story cycles reveals a longstanding celebration of innovation that evinces the influence of a modernist commitment to newness. The history of the cycle also demonstrates how little critics have attended to this tradition, which accounts for the consistent claims of novelty. Even now, each new short story cycle inspires great debates about what to call this apparently unclassifiable genre — a theme I treat throughout this book but especially in the final chapter on Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010). Egan’s popular and acclaimed volume provoked divergent declarations about its form akin to those made by Wilson, Cowley, and Mencken almost one hundred years earlier.

Scholars of the genre debate which term to use and which books fit and which do not. Robert M. Luscher and J. Gerald Kennedy separately advocate for short story sequences to ‘emphasize its progressive unfolding and cumulative effects’ (Kennedy 1995: vii); Kennedy’s preferred term, and the collection of essays that accompany his introduction to the form, acknowledges the heterogeneity of fiction that spans from the short story collection to the fragmented novel, including works such as J. D. Salinger’s Nine Stories (1953) and Raymond Carver’s Cathedral (1983) as short story sequences. In his essay ‘Towards a Poetics of the Short Story Cycle’ (1988) Kennedy rightly critiques the emphasis on unity that dominated early criticism on short story cycles, arguing that any coherence that emerges from such volumes has as much to do with the reader’s perception as it does with authorial intention or formal design. Luscher makes a compelling case for sequence by highlighting the ‘form’s kinship with the sonnet sequence and the modern poetic sequence’ (1989: 149). He argues that the sequence invites the singularity of the story, the diversity of the novel, and the harmony and distillation of lyric poetry.

Conversely, Maggie Dunn and Ann Morris lobby for composite novel to highlight the genre’s association not with the short story but with the novel. They assert that such volumes have ‘whole-text coherence’ (Dunn and Morris 1995: 1), and they critique short story cycle as a term because it conjures the story’s inferior position to the novel in the marketplace and often in readers’ estimation. Occasionally, the volumes themselves include subtitles supporting Dunn and Morris’s sense that market forces drive how such volumes get packaged. In the chapters that follow, I often include books that carry various subtitles, for instance Rebecca Barry’s Later, at the Bar: A Novel in Stories (2007). Others include the inscription ‘A Novel’, such as Russell Banks’s Trailerpark (1981) and Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1989), and still others, such as Cathy Day’s The Circus in Winter (2004), get around such generic distinction by subtitling the work ‘Fiction’. The repetition of such labels certainly indicates publishers’ anxieties that short stories do not sell and that readers need to know how to read these volumes.

However, in their eagerness to have these volumes read and studied, Dunn and Morris miss how formative the short story is to such books, so much so that Rolf Lundén argues for short story composite. His study rightly attends to the tensions between unity and fragmentation that distinguish the genre, and he argues that not every such volume features cyclicality or sequencing. Lundén makes a compelling case that the emphasis on unity in critical debates emerges from a ‘post-Kantian, Coleridgean ideal of esthetic organicism’ (1999: 8). That is, from the eighteenth and into the twentieth centuries, scholars and readers alike privileged ‘totalized prose forms such as the social-realistic novel’ at the expense of ‘more openly constructed forms of narrative’ (Lundén 1999: 8). Aesthetic unity and coherence became the measure of great art, and disjointed and open works were often dismissed as flawed or uninteresting. To address this, Lundén advocates for short story composite, which attends to the constitutive significance of the short story as well as the volumes’ openness, while still recognising the effects of accretion that go into making a volume. He argues that cycle is a problematic label for many of these books, which lack cyclicality, an emphasis on which would seem to continue the New Critical, post-Kantian emphasis on unity worked out through irony and juxtaposition.

And yet, cycle has emerged as the dominant metaphor to describe the genre, beginning with Forrest Ingram’s foundational study from 1971. Ingram was the first to study the genre’s attempts at coherence, by attending to compositional history and authorial intention, and defines the cycle as ‘a book of short stories so linked by their author that the reader’s successive experience on various levels of the pattern of the whole significantly modifies his experience of each of its component parts’ (1971: 19; original emphasis). Ingram employs the term short story cycle as do studies by Susan Garland Mann (1989), Rocio Davis (2002), James Nagel (2001), Mark Whalan (2007), Michelle Pacht (2009), and Benjamin Forkner (2012) (some with, and others without, the hyphen). In a 2013 special issue on the genre in Short Fiction in Theory and Practice, Elke D’hoker argues that formal and reader-oriented approaches dominate current criticism (2013: 155). D’hoker looks to international scholarship, which often treats the cycle as part of much larger shifts in narrative style, as presenting Anglo-American criticism with a ‘potentially liberating shift away from problems of definition, terminology and taxonomy’ (2013: 156). Although it is an imperfect term and there are many variants, short story cycle has become the primary and best descriptor for the genre, because it most accurately captures the recursiveness central to the genre and privileges the short story as its formative element. Concerns about authorial intention, readerly experience, revision, paratextual framing, generic distinctions, and the stories themselves all contribute to these scholars’ debate over the terms. Such debates, while often fascinating in the context of a single text, ultimately obscure a longstanding, wide-reaching tradition, so my book is more interested in what these books do than in what we call them.

Moreover, genre itself has always been a fluid, hybrid element of compositional and reading practices. Histories of the novel, for instance, have long revealed the incredible diversity of the origins for, manifestations of, and experimentations with the novel. The prose poem provides a parallel to the short story cycle. The prose poem is akin to the cycle in its hybridity and flexibility and in its apparent novelty yet longstanding tradition. It seems to have exploded in recent decades with the proliferation of creative writing programmes and a turn toward distilled forms like flash fiction, but its origins include Charles Baudelaire, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein, among many others. Michel Delville, who has written a foundational study of the genre, makes the argument that attempts to arrive at a ‘monolithic definition of the genre’ fall short because there are ‘almost as many trends as there are poets practicing it’? (1998: 1). Likewise, the cycle, by whatever name, enjoys the kinds of formal diversity of the novel or the prose poem. Rather than narrowing, my book broadens the scope of the genre by treating volumes that others call sketchbooks, novels, collections, composite novels, and short story sequences, similar to histories of the novel that examine the picaresque, the bildungsroman, the gothic, and even the anti-novel.

In cycles, stories can be read singly but gain meaning together, drawing on both the power of particularity and the explosive energy of fusion. Since the early nineteenth century, increased mobility and personal choice have made community, kinship, and temporality ever more open to interpretation. The genre transforms these subjects into its very form, atomising and then linking its stories through place, family, and time. Therefore, genre is both historical and theoretical. Cycles reflect in form and content a central narrative problem of modern literature: how to articulate subjectivity. Examining the myriad iterations of short story cycles reveals that authors from different periods, ethnic and national traditions, stylistic practices, and ideological viewpoints find the cycle powerfully suggestive for depicting cultural and personal upheaval.

The cycle is particularly apt for rendering what Paul March- Russell calls the ‘historical mess of lived experience’ (2009: 111), which is why the genre proliferates in moments of communal or national change, such as industrialisation, war, or decolonisation. In these contexts, cycles challenge the ‘authenticity of historical narrative’ (March-Russell 2009: 115) by embracing multiple points of view, non-linear chronologies, as well as complex kinship structures and communal affiliations. One example of this is Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (1990). Following in the tradition of Hemingway’s In Our Time, O’Brien’s stories render the trauma of participating in conflict about which one feels ambivalence. These cycles reflect the individual — even autobiographical — and collective violence done to and by a generation through interconnected stories that stand alone and yet, when taken together, portray quotidian and extraordinary pain. Their stories capture the ‘mess of lived experience’ during and after World War I and the Vietnam War, respectively, in a form that allows for a lack of resolution and embraces multiplicity. As ideas and institutions that unite a group or provide meaning for the individual destabilise, prove inadequate, or cause alienation, writers turn to the cycle to capture the narrative power that arises from uncertainty. In periods of great cultural and ideological upheaval, the cycle presents a form to express fragmentation and recurrence but not unity.

One common feature of the genre is its rejection of progression and resolution, as in Winesburg, Ohio and James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914), often cited as archetypal short story cycles. Prior to their publication, short stories had tended to involve plot twists and neat resolution, made popular by O. Henry (William Sydney Porter)

among others. Joyce and Anderson diverged from an emphasis on plot to focus on the inner lives of their characters. Edgar Allan Poe, in reviewing Nathaniel Hawthorne, famously celebrates the short story as the greatest artistic genre because tales have a ‘unity of effect’ arrived at through the ‘totality’ of experiencing a story in a single sitting (1984: 571, 586). Joyce and Anderson exploded this definition of the story by refuting totality; their characters often remain stunted and the plots — such as they are — go unresolved. Spiritual emptiness and economic hardship become driving forces for the short story in the wake of Joyce’s and Anderson’s cycles. Narrative itself attempts to fulfil the loss of faith — in God, progress, each other — that accompanied modernity, as Joyce explains to his brother in a letter: ‘there is a certain resemblance between the mystery of the mass and what I am trying to do .. . to give people a kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the bread of everyday life into something that has a permanent artistic life of its own’ (qtd in Scholes and Litz 1996: 250). Joyce’s fifteen stories, which trace disparate characters through youth, adolescence, maturity, and death, do not culminate in meaningful action; rather, they reflect the modernist sense that a belief in progress is destructive. They articulate that teleological narratives are no longer apt for describing modern life.

Short story cycles are dissimilar from song cycles or sonnet cycles, often characterised by an organic relationship to time that results in symmetrical repetition. A more accurate metaphor might be that of the helix, as the stories circle around a common framework without exact repetition. The linking structures — of place, time, and family — serve as axes around which the stories curve. The genre favours episodic, non-chronological narratives. The cycle’s spiralling structure disorients, creating a kind of vertigo offset by sharp moments of insight. That the insight from one story may or may not affect other stories is typical of the genre; the cycle does not, ultimately, conclude that narrative — and, by extension, life — gains clarity and unity.

The short story cycle’s form enables a radical challenge to singularity in point of view by repudiating the idea that a single narrative voice or characterisation should drive a text. Even in a cycle ostensibly grounded in such a figure, authors introduce multiple points of view and stories unrelated to the central figure. This decentring promotes the idea that no single individual has a monopoly on knowledge and experience. Thus, communal groupings are paramount in the cycle, suggesting that structures of time, family, and place comprise human identity. Thereby, the genre paints a picture of identity in process; subjectivity attains a kind of flux and restlessness. By taking place, family, and time as linking devices that only occasionally result in unity, the prevalence of the genre suggests that these bases for identity are always conditional. The form of the cycle enables the expression of identity without fixity — what I call ‘provisional identities’ — that is, flexible, dynamic identities that emerge within a story or series of stories but which are neither rigidly defined nor fixed. Reflecting the conflicts between autonomy and belonging, such constructions allow stories to assert a momentary, contingent sense of a character’s self without insisting that it remain so across the stories.

Proliferating from the nineteenth century to the present, the short story cycle constitutes an expansive history which includes influential writers and texts in American and global literatures. The preponderance of the genre across different movements from realism to modernism and postmodernism signals the continuity of the crises of coherence and legibility across these different periods. Story cycles date to the earliest written narratives, and their origins span the globe: Homer’s Odyssey, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Boccaccio’s Decameron, Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, the Indian Panchatantra, the Arabian A Thousand and One Nights, Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, and the Icelandic sagas (Ingram 1971: 17; Nagel 2001: 1-2; Lundén 1999: 7). Nineteenth-century volumes, such as Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1824-32), Honoré de Balzac’s The Human Comedy (1830-54), Ivan Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches (1852), Emile Zola’s Natural and Social History of a Family under the Second Empire (1871-93), and Gustave Flaubert’s Three Tales (1877), highlight the importance of cyclical volumes to international realism and naturalism. Dubliners is an exemplar among modernist cycles, and more recent cycles, such as Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women (1971), Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate (1989), and Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak! (1995), continue to shape the genre’s global presence. Although its antecedents extend to some of the earliest narratives across the globe, the modern iteration of the short story cycle proliferated from the nineteenth century because it questions the logic of progress and rationality, so central to modernity, directly in its form.

The history of the short story cycle exposes that the genre emerges and proliferates in places and at times of new identity formations: nineteenth-century Europe, turn-of-the-century America, and in recent decades in the Caribbean, to name just a few. The noted correlations between the cycle and national, gendered, and ethnic formations suggest that the genre repeatedly emerges during moments of embattled identity-making. The problems of coherence intrinsic to the cycle — of being both singular and connected — comport with an anxiety of unity formative, but not unique, to US culture. In scholarship and among authors, a pattern emerges: to claim that the genre is analogous to national and regional identities. The tendency to want to see the cycle as distinctive to a place reveals that the genre has flexibility and multiplicity. Lundén argues that the form resonates with ‘the conjunction of centripetal and centrifugal forces in American society and the American “character”’ (1999: 108). Gerald Lynch (2001) asserts that Canadian cycles make one from many, paralleling the way provinces contribute to Canadian national identity. Julie Barak (1998) claims that the cycle mirrors the creation of Caribbean identity from many distinct national and cultural identities, which reflect the geography of the archipelago. The model of standing alone but being more meaningful together, enacted in the genre, offers a compelling analogy to the pluralism of many geopolitical bodies. These critics get it right: authors do see the form as opening up new possibilities for national and local expression. And yet, it must also be acknowledged how international and transportable this form is. Like the modernist critics who insisted on authorial originality, these scholarly responses suggest that ostensibly new genres contribute to the formation of (trans)national traditions simultaneously.

Other critics, such as Margot Kelley (2000), Karen Weekes (2002), Rachel Lister (2007), and Helena Kadmos (2014), argue that the form, for reasons both practical and conceptual, is especially conducive to illuminating the experiences of women writers. From the mid-nineteenth century, women working in the genre have been pre-eminent. Because of the short story’s ability to be published in magazines as well as in book form, it fulfils the demands of both magazine and book publishing. Critics argue that those writers with competing demands on their time (including parenting, pursuing a Master of Fine Arts, and working other jobs) find the cycle amenable to the immediate conditions of their work and long-range goals in producing a book. In the cycle, selfhood develops not out of autonomy and sustained realisation but from interconnectedness. It engages with decentralised narration and resistance to teleology, going against characteristics often associated with the novel and masculinity. Kadmos argues that the genre ‘provides rich material through which to explore multi-layered representations of women’s lives in a variety of roles as wives, mothers, aunts, daughters, sisters, and neighbours, as bearers of knowledge, as teachers who are resourceful and resilient’ (2014: 2). The cycle is not the special province of women, and yet it has been a richly generative form for women, which I tackle in Chapters 1 and 4 especially.

Critics, particularly James Nagel and Rocio Davis, also attend to the marked correlation between ethnic minorities and the cycle. Nagel (2001) carefully focuses on the multivalent ethnic ties in constructing story cycles, turning first to Louise Erdrich’s engagement with the multivoiced narrators of Chippewa gossip in Love Medicine (1984) and then examining the revisions to divergent cultural forms in writers such as Jamaica Kincaid, Susan Minot, Tim O’Brien, and Robert Olen Butler, among others. He frames this ‘ethnic resonance’ as inspiring writers of the 1980s and 1990s. Davis turns her attention to Asian American and Asian Canadian story cycles to argue that the genre is the ‘formal materialization of the trope of multiplicity’ (2002: 19) for writers such as Sara Suleri and Toshio Mori, among others. A formal analysis of the short story cycle, with an eye to how it reflects the creation and deployment of ethnic identities, exposes the continuous presence of such formations from its very beginnings. Davis turns to genre as a way to break the monolith of ethnographic approaches that dominated the study of ethnic literatures in the 1980s and 1990s, finding that the cycle ‘illustrates the general process of multiethnic literature toward plurality, multiplicity, polyphony, and fragmentation’ (2002: 17). An outcome of this has been the integration of autobiography and children’s fiction into the genre, as well as an expansion of what a short story is, as many of these books contain one-page vignettes and others include eightypage novellas.

I, too, engage a comparative approach to ‘reveal the extent to which various ethnic literatures that are now often studied in isolation share a repertoire of available literary language’ (Sollors 1995: 303). The cycle proves to be a productive piece of that repertoire because the stories within can draw from comparative ethnic experiences without losing specificity. For instance, conflicts over the precarious place of an indigenous nation within the United States condition the representation of Ojibwe identities and experiences in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine. Julia Alvarez’s depiction of Dominican identity and experiences in How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) has a great deal in common with Erdrich’s treatment but differs sharply with Junot Diaz’s depiction of Dominican life in the United States in Drown (1996) and This Is How You Lose Her (2012). The cycle resists essentialism. By displacing a central protagonist, these texts achieve a brand of collective experience and history largely unavailable in the novel and impossible in the story.

When I began this project, I had a suspicion that cycles were apprentice works. I thought that if I could understand the cycle,

I could understand the battles for authority and narration that characterise novels by Faulkner, John Dos Passos, Kurt Vonnegut, and Toni Morrison. Cycles were a footnote on my way to more important works. I think this false impression resulted from a sense that Winesburg matters mostly because it influenced the high modernist experimentation of Hemingway and Faulkner. I think this also resulted from an early reading of Hemingway’s In Our Time and a general sense that his novels mattered more to his literary reputation. Moreover, it derived from a general consensus — hard to pinpoint but nonetheless powerful — that novels are harder to write and therefore more worthy of study. Story cycles do not require the unity or the commitment to characterisation of the novel, and they can give the impression of an author learning how to write a novel through a cycle. What I found in my research, though, is that the techniques that define modernist expression were most often fully realised in the cycle. I found that modernist novels bear the imprint of the cycle. I now think that In Our Time is the height of Hemingway’s achievement, Winesburg is certainly the height of Anderson’s, and Faulkner’s multivoiced novels are only possible because of the cycle.

I also came to realise that I was placing modernism on a pedestal. And that, if I did not make modernism the height of expression, as I and others too often do, then the short story cycle deserves an even more prominent place. Cycles in the nineteenth century profoundly interrogate the meaning of industrialisation and the interplay of the community and individual. Cycles, from the mid-twentieth century to today, constitute a vital, heterogeneous genre. They engage in formal and linguistic experimentation that their modernist predecessors would celebrate, but they also have their own contributions to make. They offer multiple responses to the nature of subjectivity and render beautiful and grotesque the desire to belong.

This book offers a reappraisal of modern American fiction by examining the history of the short story cycle — a form which fostered aesthetics of fragmentation, disjunction, and recurrence. Bringing together archival materials, such as correspondence and manuscript revisions, and critical and popular reception, I delineate how both authors and readers conceive of this genre as the ideal form for articulating the contingency of modernity. The short story cycle offers a powerful articulation of subjectivity and formal hybridity, which we miss if we only look at poetry or novels. Our ideas about the formation of identity that emerge from texts like Leaves of Grass or Moby Dick focus too narrowly on the creation of singular (albeit very complex) individuals such as Whitman’s speaker, Ishmael, or Ahab. In contrast, the cycle advances the proliferation in points of view and temporalities as a way of multiplying potential models for American cultural identity. Characters like Mrs. Spring Fragrance, George Willard, Ike McCaslin, and Yolanda Garcia depict the flux and range endemic to identity formation. The cycle merits a larger scholarly discourse, akin to that on the development of the novel. We just need more people to tell its story. What follows is my version.

Chapter 1

Suddenly I decided to go back to the Winesburg form. That is really a novel. It is a form in which I feel at ease. I invented it. It was mine. (“To Roger Sergel’, in Anderson 1984: 220)

I have even sometimes thought that the novel form does not fit an American writer, that it is a form which had been brought in. What I wanted is a new looseness; and in Winesburg I had made my own form. (Anderson 1942: 289)

In the summer of 1938, Sherwood Anderson began work on a new novel, but he was unhappy with the result. He decided to ‘go back to the Winesburg form’ (Anderson 1984: 220). According to him, when Winesburg, Ohio appeared in 1919, its form was wholly new — he had invented a new genre, named it for his volume, and claimed ownership. In his Memoirs (1942), Anderson links his formal innovation to an idea of US nationhood, which bolstered his sense that creating a national literature was paramount to the artistic projects of his time and circle; this sentiment repeats throughout his essays, memoirs, and letters. His reputation as a pioneer grew in proportion to his influence on other modernists, including most famously Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Jean Toomer, and John Steinbeck. Anderson, seen so often as the arbiter of the genre, would chase the genre’s magic for decades. His claims reveal the genre’s power in capturing what seemed to be new experiences and ideas about storytelling.

Anderson’s disparate statements on the volume’s form — that it is and is not a novel — reveal a lack of language available to describe its seemingly unique position between novel and short story collection. The interplay between independent and interconnected tales generated new ways to tell stories, especially as authors increasingly concluded that ‘Life is a loose, flowing thing. There are no plot stories in life’ (Anderson 1942: 289). In A Story Teller’s Story (1924), Anderson crystallises his intent: ‘What was wanted I thought was form, not plot, an altogether more elusive and difficult thing to come at’ (1989: 352). The lack of certainty about what to call this form and the sense of innovation remain with the cycle even today. Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio remains a touchstone, even standard-bearer, for the genre.

His claims to utter originality are, however, a bit false. Fiction had long exhibited an aversion to unity, clarity, and resolution and sought new ways to express fragmentation, confusion, and indecipherability. Anderson made innovations to the form, maximising its expressionist possibilities and engaging an appreciation for local places and quotidian events that would inspire Faulkner, Steinbeck, and the rest. Yet, Winesburg follows a long tradition of volumes that had exactly the kind of ‘new looseness’ Anderson claims for his own volume, including modernist works that directly preceded his own such as Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives (1909) and Edgar Lee Masters’s poetic cycle Spoon River Anthology (1915). The particular device of using a common setting for a series of prose tales, as in Winesburg, dates to at least the mid-nineteenth century in the United States and Europe. This chapter corrects the long-held assumption that the form began with modernist blockbusters and instead suggests that modernist writers revised a vibrant regionalist tradition to their own uses. I trace the development of the cycle from a regionalist tradition often marked by an attention to those living on the fringes of America. Scholars, due in part to a modernist investment in newness and in part because of the writers he influenced, have tended to take Anderson too much at his word. Instead, Winesburg cast modernity in terms of a mode of literary expression invested in both realism and the newest avant-garde practices, generating a watershed moment in an already dynamic genre.

The short story cycle’s treatment of a particular place descends from nineteenth-century village sketchbooks — what Sandra Zagarell (1988) terms, in her seminal essay, ‘narrative[s] of community’. Such volumes privilege a singular setting, emphasise localised language and practices, obfuscate linear/chronological development in favour of process, render the quotidian in episodic tales, and depict narrators who are ‘participant/observers’ (Zagarell 1988: 503). According to Zagarell, a ‘Narrative of community thus represents a coherent response to the social, economic, cultural, and demographic changes caused by industrialism, urbanization, and the spread of capitalism’ (1988: 499). Zagarell isolates the genre’s core conventions in the works of Elizabeth Gaskell and Sarah Orne Jewett, among others. However, the volumes do not evince a wholly coherent, positive preindustrial ideal but instead are deeply entrenched in the alienation that accompanied urbanisation and industrialisation. Zagarell, too, reconsidered the wholly positive depiction of community she examined in her original essay to acknowledge the ‘many-valenced’ treatments of community. Almost twenty years after the publication of her original essay, Zagarell wrote of these communities that ‘Some are sustaining, some destructive; all are contingent on the specific history, racial and ethnic circumstances, gender relations, sexual norms, and other factors which inform them’ (2007: 434).