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Notes and Queries Advance Access published April 24, 2013 2013 NOTES AND QUERIES Notes and Queries ß Oxford University Press 2013; all rights reserved

Notes

1 For a consideration of the emergence of the short story in American literature, see Joyce Carol Oates’s ‘Preface’ and ‘Introduction’ to her anthology The Oxford Book of American Short Stories, 2nd edn (New York, 2012) and Robert F. Marler’s essay ‘From Tale to Short Story: The Emergence of a New Genre in the 1850’s’ in the Charles E. May-edited collection The New Short Story Theories (Athens, OH, 1994). Oates believes that the change in narrative voice was crucial, describing as she sees it ‘the movement . . . from a mode of impersonal storytelling in which the narrator is likely to be invisible, anonymous, and even irrelevant to the tale, to a mode of storytelling that is intensely personal, self-conscious, and narrated in a distinctive ‘‘voice’’’ (xvii). Marler, for his part, believes that characterization was the determining factor in this emergence: while characters in tales are not like ‘real people’, in short stories they have ‘personality’ and ‘inner consciousness’ (166). 2 Fred Lewis Pattee, The Development of the American Short Story: An Historical Survey (New York, 1923), 3.

characterized by ‘the development of theme and technique’ and by the evocation of a specific locale.3 Joyce Carol Oates, notably, begins her anthology of American short stories spanning 180 years with ‘Rip Van Winkle’.4 One of the problems, however, with extending the current understanding of the short story this far back in American literary history is that the term itself, as far as is known, did not then exist. Irving used the term ‘sketch’, and Nathaniel Hawthorne along with most other American writers in the nineteenth century used ‘tale’. Not until the twentieth century did the term ‘short story’ become common and acquire all the associations it holds today. In fact, none of the American dictionaries of the nineteenth century include the term.5 When it first started appearing in dictionaries in the early twentieth century, ‘short story’ was evidently regarded as a neologism.6 Nevertheless, it is instructive to compare the lexicographical histories of the term on each side of the Atlantic. Not only do substantial differences between the British and the American views of the short story become clear from such a comparison, but also, if the emergence of the term in the language can be pinpointed, it might be possible to shed further light on the questions concerning the emergence of the genre in the nineteenth century. In Britain, ‘short story’ made its dictionary debut in 1914 in the New English Dictionary— to all intents and purposes, the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary—which tentatively defined the term as: ‘a prose work of fiction, differing from a novel by being shorter and less elaborate; a novelette.’7 The sole 3 Alfred Bendixen and James Nagel (eds.), A Companion to the American Short Story (Chichester, UK and Malden, MA, 2010), 3–4. 4 Joyce Carol Oates (ed.), The Oxford Book of American Short Stories, 2nd edn (New York, 2012). 5 See, for instance, Joseph E. Worcester’s Dictionary of the English Language (Boston, 1873), Noah Webster’s An American Dictionary of the English Language (Springfield, MA, 1875) revised by Chauncey A. Goodrich and Noah Porter, and The Century Dictionary 8 vols (New York, 1889). 6 In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the term ‘short story’ did begin to achieve some currency in the magazine and periodical trade on both sides of the Atlantic. 7 New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, ed. James Murray, 12 vols (Oxford, 1888–1928). See vol. VIII, Q–Sh (1914), s.v. ‘short’, A. adj., 8. b.

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POE AND THE FIRST USE OF THE TERM ‘SHORT STORY’ JUST what constitutes a short story, as well as when and where the form first emerged, remain pressing questions, especially in the United States where short stories have enjoyed popular and literary success for two centuries. If it is notoriously difficult to come up with an inclusive definition of the short story that is both accurate and serviceable, then it is even harder to determine at what point and in which country the prose tale first developed into the modern short story.1 Yet so strong is the enduring importance of the short story in American literature that scholars have been keen to champion it as a national invention, noting its differences from earlier types of succinct narrative such as folktales and fairy stories, and setting it apart from the short story in other literatures. Since Fred Lewis Pattee claimed that with Washington Irving ‘there was born the American short story, a new genre, something distinctively and unquestionably our own in the world of letters’, others have followed in his wake by finding the origins of the short story in Irving.2 Alfred Bendixen, co-editor of A Companion to the American Short Story, argues that in ‘Rip Van Winkle’ (published in 1819) there first emerged the short story as we know it, which is to say a short work of prose fiction

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8 Oxford English Dictionary, 13 vols (Oxford, 1933). See vol. IX, S–Soldo, s.v. ‘short’, adj., 8. b., and see vol. XIII, Supplement, s.v. ‘short’, A. adj. 26. 9 Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary, ed. R. W. Burchfield, 4 vols (Oxford, 1972–86). See vol. IV, Se–Z (1986), s.v. ‘short’, A. adj., 8. b. 10 Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn, ed. J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner, 20 vols (Oxford, 1989). 11 Oxford English Dictionary Additional Series, 3 vols (Oxford, 1993–97). 12 OED3 online, s.v. ‘short’, A. adj., 8. b., accessed 30 September 2012.

the earliest use of ‘short story’ recorded by the OED. In the United States, in marked contrast to these provisional-sounding definitions that invoke the novel, ‘short story’ has been defined confidently and elaborately in American dictionaries from the outset. Appearing first in the ‘New Words’ section of the 1927 edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language—an updated version of the first edition of 1910, which was itself based on the 1890 and 1900 editions of Webster’s International Dictionary—a ‘short story’ is: ‘In narrative literature, a relatively brief prose story characterized by singleness of effect, uniformity of tone, and dramatic intensity, usually having as a plot a single action represented at the crisis.’13 The entry, in its fullness, takes a certain pride in the capabilities of the short story.14 In 1934 this definition, unchanged, made it into the main vocabulary of Webster’s New International Dictionary when the second edition proper was published.15 Approaching mid-century, the four-volume Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles, under the editorship of William A. Craigie who had previously worked as a coeditor of the OED, gave the following definition of ‘short story’: ‘Of or pertaining to a

13 Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language (Springfield, MA, 1927). See ‘New Words’ section preceding the main vocabulary, s.v. ‘short story’. The entry also includes the hyphened form of the term, ‘short-story’, as a variant. 14 Both the phrasing of this definition and the inclusion of the hyphened variant ‘short-story’ reflect the influence of Brander Matthews who was a tireless promoter of the short story in his writing and in his dealings with magazine editors. See his essay ‘The Philosophy of the Short-Story’ in Pen and Ink: Papers on Subjects of More or Less Importance (New York, 1888). For Matthews, the short story was essentially different from the novel, and he hyphened the term to emphasize the uniqueness of the genre: ‘a novelette is a brief novel. But the difference between a novel and a short-story is a difference in kind. A true short-story is something other and something more than a mere story which is short’ (68). In discussing the features of the short story and in giving examples, Matthews makes many references throughout his essay to Edgar Allan Poe. 15 Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language, 2nd edn (Springfield, MA, 1934).


accompanying quotation was from the Daily News, an English newspaper, in 1898: ‘Any really good short story writer.’ With the publication of the OED in 1933 this definition and single quotation were retained, but the supplement to this edition expanded the definition thus: ‘a story with a fully worked-out motive but of much smaller compass and less elaborate in form than a novel’.8 The addition of the phrase ‘fully worked-out motive’ lends independence to the short story, but still it is chiefly defined against the novel. The next change was not made until 1986 when the last volume of a new supplement to the OED edited by R. W. Burchfield was published.9 No definition was offered here, but the entry for the term included a much-enlarged list of ‘earlier and later examples’. Of the eleven new quotations, the first is of great interest because of its date, country, and apparent context of aesthetic judgement. Taken from the New York weekly paper the Independent in 1877, it reads: ‘some of his short stories have been almost without flaw in their glittering beauty.’ Curiously, the editors of the socalled second edition of the OED in 1989 were, it would seem, doubtful of the expanded definition put forward in the supplement of 1933; they reverted to the initial definition given in 1914, making no mention of a ‘fully worked-out motive’.10 They kept Burchfield’s expanded list of quotations, though. ‘Short story’ is not found in the Additional Series of the mid-1990s.11 And the current entry for ‘short story’ in the OED3 online is identical to that in the print edition of 1989, including the somewhat belittling synonym ‘novelette’.12 The quotation from 1877, therefore, remains

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Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles, ed. William A. Craigie, 4 vols (Chicago, 1944). See vol. IV, Recorder–Zu-Zu, s.v. ‘short story’, attrib. and comb. 17 Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language (Springfield, MA, 1961). The entry in this edition does not include the hyphened variant ‘short-story’. This definition of ‘short story’ has not been superseded in the most recent printing of the third edition in 2002.

Twice-Told Tales in 1842. Moreover, any reader familiar with Poe’s fiction will know how crucial the creation of mood is to its success. While Poe’s achievements as a writer and critic of the short story have been widely acknowledged, it has been entirely overlooked that Poe may have been the first person to use the term ‘short story’. As long ago as 1840, Poe, remarkably, referred to his own work as ‘short stories’, a neglected fact which lends support to those who would stress the American qualities of the genre. In his preface to Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, Poe informs the reader that ‘I have written five-and-twenty short stories whose general character may be so briefly defined’. The character of ‘this species of writing’, he continues, ‘preserve[s], as far as a certain point, a certain unity of design.’19 It might be that, by ‘short stories’, Poe meant merely stories that are short, in other words ‘tales’. By the same token, there is a likelihood that he had something more particular in mind, as suggested by ‘this species of writing’ with ‘a certain unity of design’. Regardless, this appearance of the term ‘short story’ in 1840—possibly its coining, either by accident or on purpose, which would make it an Americanism—is significant because it is so early. It is made all the more significant because it is written by none other than Poe himself, and because it appears at the head of such a seminal collection of short stories. In recognition of her literary predecessor, Joyce Carol Oates writes that ‘the history of the short story itself in America is bound up with the unique work Poe published in 1840, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque.’20 With regard to Poe’s speculative concepts of the short story, she notes that, sometimes, they relate only incidentally to the actual stories he wrote: the true strength of his concepts resides in their power to anticipate the aesthetic of 18 In his second review of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales (Boston, 1842) printed in Graham’s Magazine in May 1842, Poe boldly elevates the tale above the poem, the literary genre afforded the greatest cultural prestige in antebellum America. 19 Edgar Allan Poe, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, 2 vols (Philadelphia, 1840), I, 5. 20 Joyce Carol Oates (ed.), The Oxford Book of American Short Stories, 2nd edn (New York, 2012), 10.


prose narrative complete in literary form and treatment but much shorter than a novel.’16 Partisanly, the earliest quotation offered in support of this definition was from the February 1887 issue of Harper’s Magazine, which was then (as it is now) one of the premier venues of publication for the short story: ‘We are tempted to claim a national primacy in short-story writing.’ In 1961, with the publication of the third edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary, the definition of ‘short story’ from the earlier editions was altered so as to specify the creation of mood, which was privileged over the telling of the story: ‘a relatively brief invented prose narrative that typically deals with a limited group of characters involved in a single action, usu. aims at unity of effect, and often concentrates on the creation of mood rather than the telling of a story.’17 What is strikingly apparent in these American definitions, given their strange blending of classical and romantic elements, of form and feeling, is the strongly-felt presence of Edgar Allan Poe. Whether consciously or unconsciously, they echo Poe’s own prescriptive musings about the form of the short story. For Poe is not only one of the finest practitioners of the short story, but he is one of its first, most influential theorists. Several of his prefaces, essays, and reviews contain brilliant reflections on the possibilities of fiction short enough to be read at one sitting (as he memorably set the desirable length of shorter works of literature). Webster’s ‘singleness of effect’ comes (via Brander Matthews) from Poe’s second review of Hawthorne’s

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future masters of the genre. In like manner, Poe’s use of the term ‘short story’ in his preface of 1840 seems to anticipate, with uncanny prescience, all the future associations that the term would come to hold for us.

Harvard University

2013 MARTIN GREENUP

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21

Ibid., 9.