ABSTRACT
How short is a short story? What does ‘short’ mean in this context? One critic is brave, or foolhardy, enough to proffer some numbers, stating that a prose narrative of anything up to about fifty pages (say 20,000 words) can be classified as a short story. A prose narrative of more than about 150 pages (50,000 words or so) is then classed as a novel, while between the two there is that half-way house, the novella – texts such as Hermann Melville’s Billy Budd (1886–91) or Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) or Ian McEwan’s The Cement Garden (1973) (see Scofield 2006, 4–5). In a famous discussion of the short story published in 1842, one of the great early masters of the form, Edgar Allan Poe, argues that the fact that a story takes between half an hour and two hours to read allows for a ‘unity’ of form: ‘During the hour of perusal the soul of the reader is at the writer’s control’, he claims. There is no ‘weariness’, he says, no need for interruption: everything comes at one sitting. The short story produces what Poe calls ‘a single effect’ (Poe 1965, 106–8).
