At a time when the theory and criticism of literature has achieved an extraordinary level of complexity and specialization, it is curious to find a major literary genre – the modern short story – that has not been subjected to the systematic attentions of literary theory. A welcome recent development has been the increase in outlets (including specialist journals) for articles on the genre, but book-length surveys remain scarce, and relatively unsophisticated: where the theory of the novel runs to countless volumes, short story theory comprises no more than a handful of occasional works from which no developing aesthetic emerges. What does emerge from existing short story theory, such as it is, is a static notion of the genre's unity – its supposed reliance on certain unifying devices, such as a single event, straightforward characterization, a coherent ‘moment of revelation’ – from which an easily identifiable ‘point’ can be recognized.

This book argues, to the contrary, that the short story incorporates disunifying devices which are seminal features of the literary effects produced in the genre; a theoretical frame drawn from the work of (particularly) Althusser and Bakhtin is used to suggest a way of accounting for the formal and narrative disruptions discoverable in the short story.

The apparent perversity of this approach – this taking issue with the existing poetics of a literary genre – appears in a very different light when one considers the nature of the modernist project, and its seminal role in the development of the modern short story: as successive chapters argue, the formal conflicts and dissonances essential to the innovations of the major modernist writers are equally crucial to their short stories, stories which have had a formative influence on the genre in its modern phase.