The Short Story in the 90s

Book Reviews Volume 32:4, 1989 alphabetical order the authors, and chronologically the title of each book published by Tauchnitz. The text is expanded throughout by well chosen illustrations depicting many of the varied regular and special bindings, wrappers, type faces, documents and letters. A general index rounds out this landmark publication. In less capable hands, this "Bibliographical History" (in preparation for the past decade) might have extended to several volumes. Certainly in its present compact form it would not have been possible before the days of computerized assembly of material, and the "Note on Production" (which serves as a colophon to the volume) traces its growth and eventual conversion to camera-ready copy, ready for printing and binding. Modestly not mentioned is anything about the Herculean task of ordering the mass of copy into usable form, nor of the careful editing and proofreading required to free the volume of the "glitches" frequently found in so called desktop publishing. It is a magnificent tribute to its editors and its publishers, as well as an example to be followed by future researchers. The authors are members of the graduate faculty at the University of Texas in Austin: Dr. Todd is Kerr Centennial Professor Emeritus in English History and Culture; and Dr. Bowden is Senior Lecturer on Analytical Bibliography and Textual Criticism. Dr. Todd has previously written about this project, and is also known as an expert on the Thomas J. Wise forgeries and is author of several books and articles on the subject. Edwin Gilcher Cherry Plain, New York THE SHORT STORY IN THE 90s Helga Quadflieg, Die Short Story der Nineties—Narrative Kurzprosa im Spannungsfeld zwischen Ästhetizismus und Naturalismus. Frankfurt and New York: Peter Lang, 1988. $29.95 FOR SOME TIME NOW the beginnings of the modern English short story have been placed in the early twentieth century and linked to the names of James Joyce and Katherine Mansfield. Discussions of earlier attempts at short narrative prose have more or less been limited to well-known writers, such as Kipling and Stevenson, who did write short stories though they made their names primarily with novels. But the last decade of the nineteenth century was a very fruitful period for the production of short stories. A large number of new 501 Book Reviews Volume 32:4, 1989 periodicals had sprung up and to get a short story published was not very difficult. Contemporary discussion for the first time began to view the short story as an independent genre, not just "a novel in a nutshell," but so far there have been few later attempts at a systematic discussion of these writings. In her book Helga Quadflieg sees the 1890s as a crucial period for the development of the modern short story, because as a new genre the short story offered plenty of room for experimentation, and this openness attracted a wide variety of writers of different theoretical and aesthetic persuasions. The dominant new movements of the nineties were of course naturalism/new realism (defined as a reaction, influenced by Flaubert and Zola, against the stale old Victorian realism) on the one hand and aestheticism/symbolism on the other, and it is between these paradigms that Quadflieg places the development of the short story in that decade. Although new realism and aestheticism may seem like opposite ends of the spectrum, Quadflieg points out a number of links between these two approaches. They have in common the rejection of Victorian values, of the role of literature in the propagation of these values, and of traditional "realistic" modes of representation. Both champion the subjectivity of the author, reject a belief in a hidden order of meaning behind observable phenomena, and introduce a number of new themes and subjects into literature. Quadflieg discusses her selection of texts (which obviously has to leave out a large number of stories written in more traditional veins) from a structural as well as thematic perspective. The structural analysis concentrates on plot, narrative voice, time and space. On all these levels the neo-realist and aestheticist short story meet in a number of innovations which anticipate the short story of the twentieth century, and these innovative elements often blend within...