ABSTRACT
Gender and Short Fiction: Women's Tales in Contemporary Britain grows out of an international seminar held at the University of Santiago de Compostela in the spring of 2016. In his 2009 book-length introduction to the genre, Paul March-Russell affirmed that "the short story has acted at various times as a resource for writers to contest the dominant beliefs in social progress and formal cohesion". In tackling the thorny issue of the connection between gender and short fiction, indeed, one must not fall into the trap of essentialism. As Anne Besnault-Levita argued in 2007, "unless it is historicized and contextualized, the subtle question of the links between gender and the short story will not receive the theoretical answers it deserves". Over time, approaches to the interconnections between gender and genre became more theoretically sophisticated and context-bound. This introduction also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book.
