Constructing Coherence in the British Short Story Cycle

Patrick Gill received his PhD in English literature from Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz where he is now a senior lecturer. His teaching and publications focus on the efficacy of literary form. He is the author of Origins and Effects of Poetic Ambiguity in Dylan Thomas’s Collected Poems (2014) and has published essays on poetry, contemporary fiction and British and American TV culture. Florian Kläger is Professor of English at the University of Bayreuth. He holds a PhD in English literature from the University of Düsseldorf and has published several books and essays on early modern literature, diasporic fiction, and the contemporary novel. His research interests are linked by the question after the formal resources of literature for the creation of social cohesion.

Table of Contents



1 Patrick Gill, Florian Kläger
Introduction: Constructing Coherence in the British Short Story Cycle



I: Theory



2 Elke D’hoker
A Continuum of Fragmentation. Distinguishing the Short Story Cycle from the Composite Novel



3 Anja Müller-Wood
Bio-Cognitive Constraints in the Reception of Short Story Cycles



4 Corinna Norrick-Rühl
Short Story Collections and Cycles in the British Literary Marketplace



II: Traditions



5 Mark Ittensohn
A "shred and patch school of writing": The Emergence of the Modern Short Story Cycle in Late Romantic Britain



6 Rainer Emig
Recovered Coherence in an Early Short Story Cycle: Rudyard Kipling’s Plain Tales from the Hills



7 Gerri Kimber
A Cycle of Dislocation: Katherine Mansfield, Modernism, and Proto-postcolonialism



III: Transformations



8 Michael C. Frank
Two Worlds in One Book: Ways of Sunlight and the Migrant Short Story Cycle



9 Louisa Hadley
The Fateful Cycle of Fairytales: Reading A. S. Byatt’s The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye



10 Janine Hauthal
Unity in Diversity? Imagining Europe in Julian Barnes’s Cross Channel



11 Valerie O’Riordan
Traumatic Cycles: Ali Smith and A. L. Kennedy



12 Jacob Hovind
Kazuo Ishiguro’s Portraits of Paralysis



13 Roxanne Harde
"Consuming themselves endlessly": Women and Power in Livi Michael’s Short Story Cycle



14 Emma Young
Re-framing Feminist Politics in Helen Simpson’s A Bunch of Fives: Selected Stories



15 Gerd Bayer
The Short Narrative Form in David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks



List of Contributors