LIT 3024 - Spring 2025 - Cowan

This course will survey various forms of literature that might be described as “short stories” in the hopes to challenge the genre constraints. The beginning of the class will look at early predecessors of the short story: the fable; the anecdote; the folk tale, etc. Later parts of the course will look at short stories emerging as a distinct literary genre in the nineteenth century, and on into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

In terms of historical methodology, we would also like to ask particular questions: How do social contexts shape literary products? These questions will require us to consider issues of intertextuality, influence, national and world literatures, trans-culturalism, hegemony, and historiography.