The Modernist Short Story

The modernist period saw a revolution in fictional practice most famously in the work of novelists such as Joyce and Woolf. Dominic Head shows that the short story with its particular stress on literary artifice was a central site for modernist innovation. Working against a conventional approach and towards a more rigourous and sophisticated theory of the genre using a framework drawn from Althusser and Bakhtin he examines the short story''s range of formal effects such as the disunifying function of ellipsis and ambiguity. Separate chapters on Joyce Woolf and Katherine Mansfield highlight their strategies of formal dissonance involving a conflict of voices within the narrative. Finally Dominic Head''s challenging conclusion takes the implications of his study into the age of postmodernism.