Quick Search:

Only anecdotal: Diane Williams, loneliness and short story form

Reese, Sam ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0023-3333 (2022) Only anecdotal: Diane Williams, loneliness and short story form. Short Fiction in Theory & Practice, 12 (1). pp. 19-30.

[thumbnail of Only Anecdotal.pdf]
Preview
Text
Only Anecdotal.pdf - Accepted Version

| Preview
[thumbnail of Only Anecdotal.docx] Text
Only Anecdotal.docx - Accepted Version

Abstract

Traditionally, the short story has been understood as almost synonymous with loneliness, characterized by theorists and writers like Frank O’Connor as the quintessential ‘lonely form’. Contemporary short story writer Diane Williams stands out for her idiosyncratic challenge to the conventions of short story structure, drawing deliberately on the partiality and contingency of the anecdote. Analysing the structure and style of Williams’s 2016 collection Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, this article explores how a turn to anecdotal structures might shift the short story form’s traditional polarity towards loneliness ‐ a particularly urgent question in an increasingly lonely culture.

Item Type: Article
Status: Published
DOI: 10.1386/fict_00046_1
School/Department: School of Humanities
URI: https://ray.yorksj.ac.uk/id/eprint/6452

University Staff: Request a correction | RaY Editors: Update this record