The Contemporary American Short-Story Cycle: The Ethnic Resonance of Genre Paperback - 2001

From the publisher

Essential intellectual background for understanding a venerable literary tradition as it is practiced today The short-story cycle - a literary genre as ancient as A Thousand and One Nights and as modern as James Joyce's Dubliners - has rapidly ascended over the last twenty years to become one of the dominant forms in American fiction. Most scholars and book reviewers, however, lack awareness of the short-story cycle's rich legacy in this country and consistently misconstrue new works of the genre as novels. James Nagel offers the first systematic history and definition of the story cycle as exemplified in contemporary American fiction, bringing attention to the format's wide appeal among various ethnic groups. Differentiating the cycle from the more tightly unified novel on one side and the less coherent story collection on the other, Nagel examines in detail eight recent manifestations of the short-story cycle genre; Love Medicine, by Louise Erdrich; Annie John, by Jamaica Kincaid; Monkeys, by Susan Minot; The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros; The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien; How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, by Julia Alvarez; The Joy Luck Club, by Amy Ta