The Oxford Book of English Short Stories , edited by A. S. Byatt,
herself the author of several collections of short stories, is the
first anthology to specifically take the English short story as its
theme. The 37 stories featured here are selected from the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ranging from Dickens, Trollope,
and Hardy to J. G. Ballard, Angela Carter, and Ian McEwan, though
many draw ingeniously from the richness of earlier English literary
writing. There are all sorts of threads of connection and contrast
running through these stories. Their subjects vary from the sublime
to the ridiculous, from the momentous to the trivial, from the grim
to the farcical. There is English empiricism, English pragmatism,
English starkness, English humour, English satire, English
dandyism, English horror, and English whimsy. There are examples of
social realism, from rural poverty to blitzed London; ghost stories
and tales of the supernatural; surreal fantasy and science fiction.
There are stories of sensibility, precisely delineated, from
Hardy's reluctant bride to the shocked heroine of Elizabeth
Taylor's The Blush, from H. E. Bates's brilliant fusion of class,
sex, death, and landscape, to D. H. Lawrence's exploration of a
consciousness slowly detaching itself from its world. There are
exuberant stories by Saki and Waugh, Wodehouse and Firbank, with a
particularly English range from high irony to pure orchestrated
farce. The very range and scope of the collection celebrates the
eccentric differences and excellences of English short stories.
Some of A. S. Byatt's choices clearly take their place in the grand
tradition of story-telling, while others are more unusual. Many
break all the rules of unity of tone and narrative, appearing to be
one kind of story before unexpectedly turning into another. They
pack together comedy and tragedy, farce and delicacy, elegance and
the grotesque, with language as various as the subject matter. As
A. S. Byatt explains: 'My only criterion was that those stories I
selected should be startling and satisfying, and if possible make
the hairs on the neck prickle with excitement, aesthetic or
narrative'.
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