Studying the Short-story Book Reviews

Studying the Short-story by Joseph Berg Esenwein Book Summary

The first story-teller was that primitive man who in his wanderings afield met some strange adventure and returned to his fellows to narrate it. His narration was a true story. The first fictionist—perhaps it was the same hairy savage—was he who, having chosen to tell his adventure, also resolved to add to it some details wrought of his own fancy. That was fiction, because while the story was compounded of truth it was worked out by the aid of imagination, and so was close kin to the story born entirely of fancy which merely uses true-seeming things, or veritable contributory facts, to make the story “real.”
Egyptian tales, recorded on papyrus sheets, date back six thousand years. Adventure was their theme, while gods and heroes, beasts and wonders, furnished their incidents. When love was introduced, obscenities often followed, so that the ancient tales of pure adventure are best suited to present-day reading.
What is true of Egypt 4000 B. C. is equally true of Greece many centuries later. The Homeric stories will serve as specimens of adventure narrative; and the Milesian tales furnish the erotic type.
As for the literary art of these early fictions, we need only refer to ancient poetry to see how perfect was its development two thousand and more years ago; therefore—for the poets were story-tellers—we need not marvel at the majestic diction, poetic ideas, and dramatic simplicity of such short-stories as the Egyptian “Tales of the Magicians,” fully six thousand years old; the Homeric legends, told possibly twenty-five hundred years ago; “The Book of Esther,” written more than twenty-one hundred years ago; and the stories by Lucius Apuleius, in The Golden Ass, quite two thousand years old.
In form these ancient stories were of three types: the anecdote (often expanded beyond the normal limits of anecdote); the scenario, or outline of what might well have been told as a longer story; and the tale, or straightforward chain of incidents with no real complicating plot.
Story-telling maintained much the same pace until the early middle ages, when the sway of religious ideas was felt in every department of life. Superstition had always vested the forces of nature with more than natural attributes, so that the wonder tale was normally the companion of the war or adventure story. But now the power of the Christian religion was laying hold upon all minds, and the French conte dévot, or miracle story, recited the wonderful doings of the saints in human behalf, or told how some pious mystic had encountered heavenly forces, triumphed over demons and monsters of evil, and performed prodigies of piety.
These tales were loosely hung together, and exhibited none of the compression and sense of orderly climax characteristic of the short-story to-day. In style the early medieval stories fell far below classic models, naturally enough, for language was feeling the corrupting influences of that inrush of barbarian peoples which at length brought Rome to the dust, while culture was conserved only in out-of-the-way places. In form these narratives were chiefly the tale, the anecdote, and the episode, by which I mean a fragmentary part of a longer tale with which it had little or no organic connection.

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