Library: Short Story Resources &amp; Criticism: Find Literary Criticisms

Keywords

Here are some keywords to use in your searches. Remember to use terms that will narrow your search!

Alice Munro
Alice Walker
Allegory
Alliteration
Allusion
Annie Proulx
Antagonist
Anton Chekhov
Barry Hannah
Characterization / Direct Characterization / Indirect Characterization
Characters
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Climax (or the high point of tension in a plot)
Complication
Conflict (also known as the story problem)
Criticism / literary criticism
Daphne du Maurier
Dénouement
Description
Diction
Dynamic character
Edgar Allan Poe
Elizabeth McCracken
Epiphany
Ernest Hemingway
Etgar Keret
Exposition
Fable
Falling Action
First-person or participant narrator
Flannery O'Connor
Flashback
Flash fiction
Flashforward
Flat character
Foreshadowing
Franz Kafka
Genre
Grace Paley
Henry James
Herman Melville
Hyperbole
Imagery
Ironic point of view
Irony / Dramatic irony
Isaac Babel
Italo Calvino
James Baldwin
James Joyce
John Cheever
Jorge Luis Borges
Joyce Carol Oates
Kate Chopin
Krys Lee
Lauren Groff'
Local color or regionalism
Limited or selective omniscience
Mark Twain
Motif
Narrator / naïve narrator / unreliable narrator
Nikolai Gogol
Novelette
Novella
O. Henry
Objective
Omniscience
Oscar Wilde
Parable
Plot
Poetry
Point of view
Protagonist
Ray Bradbury
Raymond Carver
Realism
Resolution
Rising Action
Round character
Setting
Shirley Jackson
Short Story
Static character
Stephen King
Stock character
Story
Story of initiation
Structure
Style
Suspense
Symbol
Tale
Ted Chiang
Theme
Third-person or non-participant narrator
Tim O'Brien
Tobias Wolff
Tone
Understatement
W. W. Jacobs
Washington Irving

E-Books & Encyclopedias

African American Short Story Writers
African American Short Story Writers is a single-volume reference containing essays carefully selected by our editors to provide the best information about the topic covered. This volume's essays discuss influential writers such as Maya Angelou, Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, and Richard Wright.
American Short Story
Diverse in theme, style, and cultural context, the American short story can take many forms. The only common theme is the short story's unique ability to captivate an audience. This volume discusses the origin and popularity of the short story. Original critical essays on a diverse collection of writers highlight Edgar Allen Poe, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, O. Henry, Kate Chopin, and many others.
Asian Short Story Writers
Asian Short Story Writers is a single-volume reference that our editors carefully selected to provide the best information about the covered topic. The essays in Asian Short Story Writers discuss such influential authors as Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Maxine Hong Kingston, Haruki Murakami, and Paul Yoon.
Critical Survey of Short Fiction
Available in seven volumes and electronically (see MagillOnLiterature Plus below). Organized by the author's last name, articles generally focus on the writer's achievements rather than specific stories. Criticism is limited to a story's relationship to the author's work.
The Edinburgh Companion to the Short Story in English
This collection explores the history and development of the anglophone short story since the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Encyclopedia of the American Short Story
Two-volume set that introduces American short fiction from the 19th century to the present.
History of the Short Story
History of the Short Story is a single-volume reference containing essays carefully selected by our editors to provide the best information about the topic covered. The essays in this volume include Short Fiction in Antiquity, The Twenty-first Century, Time Line, and Chronological List of Writers.
Short Story Theories: A Twenty-First-Century Perspective
Short Story Theories: A Twenty-First-Century Perspective problematizes different aspects of the renewal and development of the short story. This collection addresses the most recent theoretical issues raised by the short story as a genre and offers theoretical and practical perspectives on the form. Centering as it does on specific authors and the broader implications of short story poetics, this collection presents a new series of essays that reinterpret canonical writers of the genre and advance new critical insights on the most recent trends and contemporary authors.
Short Story Writing: A Practical Treatise on the Art of the Short Story
A practical treatise on the art of the short story, designed to present concretely the rules of the art. It is a working manual, not a collection of untried theories. It tells how to write a story concerning the requirements of contemporary editors.'Both an exciting and valuable books. While it is concerned with the unique application of rhetorical principles to a particular department of literary art, it carries a general application that all academic workers may profit by, as in its chapters on Titles, Style, and the Labor of Authorship.

E-books on Women's Issues in Short Stories

British and Irish Short Story Writers on Women's Issues
British and Irish Short Story Writers on Women's Issues is a single-volume reference containing essays carefully selected by our editors to provide the best information about the topic covered. The essays in this volume discuss such influential writers as A. S. Byatt, Anne Enright, Jean Rhys, and Fay Weldon.
Fantastic Short Stories by Women Authors From Spain and Latin America: A Critical Anthology
The fantastic has been particularly prolific in Hispanic countries during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, mainly due to the legacy of short-story writers and the Latin-American boom that presented alternatives to the model of literary realism. While these writers' works have done much to establish the Hispanic fantastic in the international literary canon, women authors from Spain and Latin America are not always acknowledged, and their work is less well-known to readers. This critical anthology aims to make Hispanic female writers of the fantastic visible to a public representative selection of their work and to make it accessible to English-speaking readers. Five key authors present five short stories. They attest to the richness and diversity of fantastic fiction in the Spanish language and extend from the early twentieth to the twenty-first century, covering a range of nationalities, cultural references, and language specificities from Spain, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Argentina.
North American Short Story Writers on Women's Issues
North American Short Story Writers on Women's Issues is a single-volume reference containing essays carefully selected by our editors to provide the best information about the topic covered. The essays in this volume discuss such influential writers as Edwidge Danticat, Grace Paley, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Gertrude Stein.
World Short Story Writers on Women's Issues
World Short Story Writers on Women's Issues is a single-volume reference containing essays carefully selected by our editors to provide the best information about the topic covered. This volume's essays discuss influential writers such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Isak Dinesen, Anaïs Nin, and Bharati Mukherjee.

E-books on Thematic Issues in Short Stories

Colonial Short Story Writers
Colonial Short Story Writers is a single-volume reference containing essays that our editors carefully selected to provide the best information about the covered topic. Colonial Short Story Writers' papers discuss influential authors such as Chinua Achebe, Bessie Head, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and Salman Rushdie.
Gothic Short Story Writers
Gothic Short Fiction is a single-volume reference that contains selected essays from Critical Survey of Short Fiction, Fourth Edition. Our editors carefully selected every article in this set to provide the best information available about the topic covered. Gothic Short Fiction essays discuss influential authors such as Honoré de Balzac, Walter de la Mare, Washington Irving, and Edgar Allan Poe.
Magical Realism Short Story Writers
Magical Realism Short Story Writers is a single-volume reference containing essays carefully selected by our editors to provide the best information about the topic covered. The essays in this volume discuss such influential writers as Isabel Allende, Gabriel García Márquez, Joy Harjo, and Italo Calvino.
Religious Short Story Writers
Religious Short Story Writers is a single-volume reference that our editors carefully selected to provide the best information about the covered topic. Religious Short Story Writers' essays discuss influential authors such as Dante, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Flannery O'Connor and Pu Songling.
Science Fiction Short Story Writers
Science Fiction Short Story Writers is a single-volume reference that our editors carefully selected to provide the best information about the covered topic. The essays in Science Fiction Short Story Writers discuss such influential authors as Robert Heinlen, Orson Scott Card, H. G. Wells, and Ursula K. Le Guin.
Short Story Writers on Gay and Lesbian Issues
Short Story Writers on Gay and Lesbian Issues is a single-volume reference containing essays carefully selected by our editors to provide the best information about the topic covered. This volume's essays discuss influential writers such as E. M. Forster, Gertrude Stein, Tennessee Williams, and Virginia Woolf.
The Supernatural and Fantastic in Short Detective Fiction: A Survey, 1841-2000
Although fantasy and supernatural literature have long and illustrious histories, many critics contend that the fantastic and bizarre have no place in the detective story's logical, rational world. This book is the first extensive study of the tremendous in detective fiction, and it explores the highly debated question of whether detective fiction and the wild can comfortably coexist. The Locked room'mystery--which often uses the wild as a red herring to eventually be debunked by reason and logic--has long been among the most popular subgenres of detective fiction. This book also explores stories featuring almost supernaturally gifted detectives, stories where the supernatural is genuinely encountered, and stories with ambiguous endings. Close to 500 detective stories from 1841 to 2000 are discussed and analyzed in which the fantastic or bizarre plays a central role. Although not all the stories are considered successful as detective tales, in the majority, the absurd enlivens the tale and deepens the mystery without weakening the detective elements.
War Short Story Writers
War Short Story Writers is a single-volume reference that our editors carefully selected to provide the best information about the covered topic. The essays in War Short Story Writers discuss such influential authors as Stephen Crane, Ernest Hemingway, Tim O'Brien, and Christa Wolf.
World Supernatural Short Story Writers
World Supernatural Short Story Writers is a single-volume reference containing essays carefully selected by our editors to provide the best information about the topic covered. This volume's essays discuss influential writers such as Hans Christian Andersen, Gabriel García Márquez, Franz Kafka, and Zhang Jie.

Short Story Collections (Ebooks & Print)

Check out some of the library's print collection of books on short stories. Tip: use keywords to help narrow your search results!

Best American Short Stories volumes
The library has the Best American Short Stories volumes from 1942, 1955, 1970-present.
E-book collection of Short Stories
Search the libraries' databases to find more collections of e-books focusing on short stories.
Print Collection of Short Stories
Search the libraries' databases to find more collections of print books focusing on short stories