ABSTRACT
Small-scale prose fiction deserves much more careful criticism, theoretical and practical, than it has usually had. It gets elbowed out of curricula at the universities and elsewhere by its heftier relatives, novel, poetry and drama; and of the countless academic journals very few regularly give space to essays on this neglected genre. Aristotle could say that a tragic plot must have ‘a certain magnitude’, yet he made no attempt to measure that magnitude precisely; and while it can be said incontrovertibly that a short story must have a certain brevity, confining it within specific dimensions is futile. Temporal movement and logical linkage are just enough to make it a story, though no doubt insufficient to make it an interesting one. Fiction can be as disjunctive, yet as emotionally compelling, as a weird dream; and not to let ‘story’ cover cases would be to make the generic category more constricted than some modern story-tellers wish it to be.
