Telling Stories. Postcolonial Short Fiction in English. (Cross/Cultures 47) (Cross/Cultures)

The present volume is a highly comprehensive assessment of the postcolonial short story since the thirty-six contributions cover most geographical areas concerned. Another important feature is that it deals not only with exclusive practitioners of the genre (Mansfield, Munro), but also with well-known novelists (Achebe, Armah, Atwood, Carey, Rushdie), so that stimulating comparisons are suggested between shorter and longer works by the same authors. In addition, the volume is of interest for the study of aspects of orality (dialect, dance rhythms, circularity and trickster figure for instance) and of the more or less conflictual relationships between the individual (character or implied author) and the community. Furthermore, the marginalized status of women emerges as another major theme, both as regards the past for white women settlers, or the present for urbanized characters, primarily in Africa and India. The reader will also have the rare pleasure of discovering Janice Kulik Keefer's "Fox," her version of what she calls in her commentary "displaced autobiography'" or "creative non-fiction." Lastly, an extensive bibliography on the postcolonial short story opens up further possibilities for research. Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents Introduction Canada Ernest Buckler Canada’s “Another-Time-and-Space-Builder” Limitations and Possibilities On the Writing of Autobiographical Short Fictions Fox Subversive Corporeal Discourse in Margaret Atwood’s “The Female Body” A Measure of Irony Derision in Mavis Gallant’s From the Fifteenth District Voyage Towards an Ending Alice Munro’s “Goodness and Mercy” Narrative Strategies in Thomas King’s Short Stories “Rewriting the Frontier” Wilderness and Social Code in the Fiction of Alice Munro The Mirror and the Window Jane Urquhart’s “Forbidden Dances” The West Indies Writing the Ballad The Short Fiction of Samuel Selvon and Earl Lovelace “Neither Fish Nor Fowl” Paule Marshall’s Early Short Stories from a Caribbean Perspective The Poetics of Death “Tears of the Sea” by Olive Senior Colonial Literature or Caribbean Orature? Creole Chips by Edgar Mittelholzer Literary Foremother Jean Rhys’s “Sleep It Off Lady” and Two Jamaican Poems Southern Africa South African Short Fiction and Orality “In the Cage of Consciousness” Dan Jacobson’s Animal Fables and Other Bestial Narratives “Nowhere Yet Everywhere” Bessie Head’s Question of Place in the “Meditations” of 1964–65 Finding a Safe House of Fiction Nadine Gordimer’s Jump and Other Stories Women’s Short Fiction in Zimbabwe Changing Times and Focus Resuscitating the Tale in Black South African Writing The Art of Narrative in Njabulo Ndebele’s Fools West Africa Developing Agency The Later Stories of Ayi Kwei Armah Achebe’s Short Stories Their Intertextual Relationship to His Novels “Second-New” Serialization and Circulation in Basi and Company by Ken Saro-Wiwa Unanswered Questions, Unattended Quests Ama Ata Aidoo’s Short Stories Poetry as a “metaphorical guillotine” in the Works of Nisi Osundare India, Sri Lanka and the Diaspora Confession and Self-Making in the Fiction of Contemporary Indian Women Writers Transitional Identities Indian Women’s Short Stories ‘Coming Unstuck’ Salman Rushdie’s Short Story “The Courter” Negotiating Place/Re-Creating Home Short-Story Cycles by Naipaul, Mistry, and Vassanji The Captives and the Lion’s Claw Reading Romesh Gunesekera’s Monkfish Moon New Zealand Falling Away From the Centre Centrifugal and Centripetal Dynamics in Janet Frame’s Short Fiction “The Artificial and the Natural” The Development of Katherine Mansfield’s Prose Style Talking about GenX Australia Weird Tales Peter Carey’s Short Stories Henry Lawson’s “Hungerford” The Uneasy Gaze of Secondary Hegemony The Construction of Africa and New Guinea in Shaw and Shearston The Triangle of Art and Life Michael Wilding, Story Writer Works Cited The Postcolonial Short Story A Bibliography of Anthologies Notes on Contributors Edited By Jacqueline Bardolph ; Finalized For Publication By Andre Viola With Jean-pierre Durix. Includes Bibliographical References (p. [439]-455).