ebook img

Short Story Writers And Short Stories (Bloom's 20th Anniversary) PDF

204 Pages·2005·1.02 MB·English
Save to my drive
Quick download
Download
Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.

Preview Short Story Writers And Short Stories (Bloom's 20th Anniversary)

B L O O M SHORT STORY ’ S L WRITERS I T E R AND A R Y SHORT STORIES C R I T I C I S M 2 0 T H A N N I V E R S A R Y C O L L E C T I O N BLOOM’S LITERARY 20THANNIVERSARY COLLECTION CRITICISM Dramatists and Dramas The Epic Essayists and Prophets Novelists and Novels Poets and Poems Short Story Writers and Short Stories B L O O M SHORT STORY ’S L I T E WRITERS R A R Y C AND R I T I C I SHORT STORIES S M 2 0 T H A N N I V E R S A R Y C O L L E C T I O N Harold Bloom Sterling Professor of the Humanities Yale University ® ©2005 by Chelsea House Publishers, a subsidiary of Haights Cross Communications. ® www.chelseahouse.com Introduction © 2005 by Harold Bloom. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher. Printed and bound in the United States of America. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bloom, Harold. Short story writers and short stories / Harold Bloom. p. cm. — (Bloom’s 20th anniversary collection) ISBN 0-7910-8228-8 HC 0-7910-8367-5 PB 1. Short story. I. Title. PN3373.B57 2005 808.83’1—dc22 2005006399 Cover designed by Takeshi Takahashi Cover illustration by David Levine Layout by EJB Publishing Services Table of Contents S H O R T S T O PREFACE RY W Harold Bloom R I ix T E R INTRODUCTION S A N Harold Bloom D xiii S H O R T Alexandr Pushkin (1799–1837) S T 1 O R I E S Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) 3 Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875) 12 Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) 19 Nikolai Gogol (1809–1852) 30 Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883) 32 Herman Melville (1819–1891) 35 Lewis Carroll (1832–1898) 42 Mark Twain (1835–1910) 53 Henry James (1843–1916) 55 Guy de Maupassant (1850–1893) 65 Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) 69 Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) 73 O. Henry (1862–1910) 75 Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) 77 Thomas Mann (1875–1955) 82 Jack London (1876–1916) 83 Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941) 85 Stephen Crane (1879–1900) 86 James Joyce (1882–1941) 89 Franz Kafka (1883–1924) 91 D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930) 106 Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980) 108 Isaac Babel (1894–1940) 113 F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) 121 William Faulkner (1897–1962) 123 Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) 125 Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) 130 John Steinbeck (1902–1968) 133 Eudora Welty (1909–2001) 135 John Cheever (1912–1982) 145 Julio Cortázar (1914–1984) 146 Shirley Jackson (1919–1965) 148 J.D. Salinger (1919–) 150 Italo Calvino (1923–1985) 152 Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) 159 Cynthia Ozick (1928–) 168 John Updike (1932–) 175 Raymond Carver (1938–1988) 176 FURTHERREADING 179 INDEX 181 ABOUTTHEAUTHOR 188 S H O R T S T O R Y W R I T E R S Preface A N D S Harold Bloom H O R T S T O R I E S I BEGAN EDITING ANTHOLOGIES OF LITERARY CRITICISM FOR CHELSEA House in early 1984, but the first volume, Edgar Allan Poe: Modern Critical Views, was published in January, 1985, so this is the twentieth anniversary of a somewhat Quixotic venture. If asked how many separate books have been issued in this project, I no longer have a precise answer, since in so long a span many volumes go out of print, and even whole series have been discontinued. A rough guess would be more than a thousand individual anthologies, a perhaps insane panoply to have been collected and intro- duced by a single critic. Some of these books have surfaced in unlikely places: hotel rooms in Bologna and Valencia, Coimbra and Oslo; used-book stalls in Frankfurt and Nice; on the shelves of writers wherever I have gone. A batch were sent by me in answer to a request from a university library in Macedonia, and I have donated some of them, also by request, to a number of prisoners serv- ing life sentences in American jails. A thousand books across a score of years can touch many shores and many lives, and at seventy-four I am a lit- tle bewildered at the strangeness of the endeavor, particularly now that it has leaped between centuries. It cannot be said that I have endorsed every critical essay reprinted, as my editor’s notes have made clear. Yet the books have to be reasonably reflective of current critical modes and educational fashions, not all of them provoking my own enthusiasm. But then I am a dinosaur, cheerfully nam- ing myself as “Bloom Brontosaurus Bardolator.” I accept only three crite- ria for greatness in imaginative literature: aesthetic splendor, cognitive power, wisdom. What is now called “relevance” will be in the dustbins in less than a generation, as our society (somewhat tardily) reforms prejudices ix

See more

The list of books you might like

Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.