WHAT IA A SHORT STORY ?

A short story is a concise form of prose fiction. Stories, myths and fairy tales of ancient times and middle ages can be considered as the precursors of modern short story. Unlike an anecdote, the unelaborated narration of a single incident, short story organizes the action, thought and dialogue of its characters into the pattern of a proper plot. The plot may be comic, tragic, romantic or satiric presented from one of many points of view using the narrative mode of fantasy, realism or naturalism. The short narrative is one of the oldest literary forms. For instance, the Hebrew bible has stories of Jonah, Ruth and Esther. Also the device of Frame- story; a narrative frame within which one or more of the characters proceeds to tell a series of short narratives ( E.g.: Boccaccio's Deccameron, 

The Arabian Nights & Canterbury Tales) has the elements of modern short story in it. The short story emerged as a more or less independent text type at the end of the eighteenth century along with the development of the novel and the newspaper. Regularly issued magazines of the 19th century such as Tatler and Spectator provided an ideal medium for their publication. The short story differs from the novel in its magnitude or length. Edgar Allen Poe, who is referred to as the originator as well as the father of modern short story defines short story as a narrative which can be read at one sitting of from half an hour to two hours, and is limited to a “ certain unique or single effect” to which every detail is subordinate. Due to this limitation of length short story writer introduces a very limited number of characters and focuses on one central moment of action. 

The action of the short story, therefore often commences close to the climax, in medias res ( in the middle of the matter) , minimizes both prior exposition and the details of the setting. The central incident is presented in such a way to manifest the protagonist's life and characters to the maximum. Short stories tend to be less complex than novels. Usually a short story focuses on one incident; has a single plot, a single setting, and a small number of characters; and covers a short period of time. In the tale or “story of incident” the focus is on the course and the results of an event as in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Golden Bug where as the story of character deals with the state of mind or the psychological and moral qualities of the protagonist. When short stories intend to convey a specific ethical or moral perspective, they fall into a more specific sub- category called parables (or fables). This specific kind of short story has been used by spiritual and religious leaders worldwide to inspire, enlighten, and educate their followers. Short stories date back to oral story-telling traditions which originally produced epics such as Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. 

Oral narratives were often told in the form of rhyming or rhythmic verse, often including recurring sections or, in the case of Homer, Homeric epithets. Fables, succinct tales with an explicit "moral," said by the Greek historian Herodotus is said to have been invented in the 6th century BCE by a Greek slave named Aesop, though other times and nationalities have also been given for him. These ancient fables are today known as Aesop’s fables.The other ancient form of short story, the anecdote, was popular under the Roman Empire. Anecdotes functioned as a sort of parable, a brief realistic narrative that embodies a point. Many surviving Roman anecdotes were collected in the 13th or 14th century as the Gesta Romanorum. Anecdotes remained popular in Europe well into the 18th century, when the fictional anecdotal letters of Sir Roger de Coverley were published.In Europe, the oral story-telling tradition began to develop into written stories in the early 14th century, most notably with Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterburry Tales and Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron.

 Both of these books are composed of individual short stories (which range from farce or humorous anecdotes to well-crafted literary fictions) set within a larger narrative story (a frame story), although the frame-tale device was not adopted by all writers. At the end of the 16th century, some of the most popular short stories in Europe were the darkly tragic "novella" of Matteo Bandello (especially in their French translation). The mid 17th century in France saw the development of a refined short novel, the "nouvelle", by such authors as Madame de Lafayette. In the 1690s, traditional fairy tales began to be published (one of the most famous collections was by Charles Perrault). 

The appearance of Antoine Galland’s first modern translation of the Thousand and One Nights (or Arabian Nights) (from 1704; another translation appeared in 1710–12) would have an enormous influence on the 18th century European short stories of Voltaire, Diderot and others. The term short story covers a great diversity of prose fiction from a short short story (flash fiction) of perhaps five hundred words to a novelette or novella which is longer than a short story but shorter than a novel. This form was especially exploited in Germany where it was introduced by Goethe in 1795.

 Among the early practitioners of short story were Washington Irving, Hawthorne and Poe in America, Sir Walter Scott and Mary Shelly in England, E.T.A Hoffmann in Germany Balzac in France and Gogol, Pushkin and Turgenev in Russia. Authors such as Charles Dickens, Anton Chekhov, Leo Tolstoy, William Trevor, Herman Hesse, Vladimir Nabakov, Virginia Woolf, Rudyard Kipling, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, P.G Wodehouse, J.D Salinger, H.P Lovecraft, D.H Lawrence, Thomas Mann, Richard Matheson, Shirley Jackson, Stephen King and Earnest Hemingway were highly accomplished writers of both short stories and novels