Intro -- Table of Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- PART I: STRUCTURE -- 1. Paroxystic Characterisation -- Extremes in the fantastic short story -- 2. Antithetic Structure -- Secondary tensions -- Editing antithetic tension: Maupassant and James -- 3. Ending with a Twist -- The "twist-in-the-tail" and antithetic tension -- The "Twist-in-the-tail" and retroreading -- "Open" texts and tension -- 4. The Tools of Brevity -- Preconstructed material -- Character types -- Recurring characters and empty characters -- Tight focus -- Permanence of types -- 5. Conclusion to Part I -- Hypotyposis and schematisation -- Short stories, sensational news items and serials -- The short story: privileged object of narratology -- PART II: MEDIA -- 6. Exoticism in the Classic Short Story -- The role of the press -- Exotic subjects -- The constraints of the newspapers -- Exceptions to the rule -- 7. Short Stories and the Travelogue -- Praise of nature, criticism of culture -- From vision to judgement: guidelines for description -- PART III: READER, CHARACTER AND AUTHOR -- 8. A Foreign World -- An explicit distance -- The use of types: subversion or immersion? -- "Deceptive representations" of reality -- The great man -- "We are simply the case": James and abstract entities -- Reading at face value: the double distance -- 9. Dialogue and Character Discreditation -- Direct and indirect speech: Verga's novel versus short stories -- Dialect and distancing -- Foreign terms -- 10. The Narrator, the Reflector and the Reader -- Unreliable narrators and reflectors -- Reliable narrators and reflectors -- 11. Distance and Emotion -- The short story with a dilemma -- Readers' emotional response to the classic short story -- 12. Conclusion to Part III: Are Dostoevsky's Short Stories Polyphonic? -- Epilogue: Beyond the Classic Short Story.

Lengthy stories: the long Yvette after the brief Yveline -- Fantastic tales: the deconstruction of the self -- Authors at a crossroads -- Bibliography -- Index.

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Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2022. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.