By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Earlier this week, we offered a brief summary of Virginia Woolf’s story ‘Monday or Tuesday’. But summarising this strange little story doesn’t exactly help us in understanding what it means. So below we offer a few words of analysis of this modernist piece of impressionism. You can read ‘Monday or Tuesday’ here.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Monday or Tuesday’ appeared in Virginia Woolf’s 1921 collection of short stories, a collection which took its name, Monday or Tuesday, from this story. But can we really call a short sketch (just a page long in the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Woolf’s short fiction) without any discernible plot a ‘short story’? Before we address such questions, it’s worth considering what actually happens in Woolf’s story, which can be read here.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Among Edgar Allan Poe’s most famous tales, ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ is one of the shortest. In just a few pages, Poe paints a powerful picture of a luxurious masked ball, which is then interrupted and ultimately destroyed by the presence of a mysterious figure. You can read ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ here before proceeding to our summary of the story below.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Boarding House’ is one of the 15 stories that make up James Joyce’s 1914 collection of short stories, Dubliners. As we’ve remarked before, Dubliners is now regarded as one of the landmark texts of modernist literature, but initially sales were poor, with just 379 copies being sold in the first year (famously, 120 of these were bought by Joyce himself).
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews Kipling’s foray into the mystery genre with a psychic detective story
Previously, I’ve blogged about the intriguing micro-genre of the psychic detective story, a crossover short story genre which fuses the ghost story or weird tale with the mystery, or detective fiction. Arguably beginning with the Irish author Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1869 story ‘Green Tea’, the form was pioneered by the late Victorian writing team of E. and H. Heron with their Flaxman Low stories, but became really popular during the Edwardian era, with characters such as Algernon Blackwood’s John Silence and, shortly after this, William Hope Hodgson’s Thomas Carnacki and Alice and Claude Askew’s Aylmer Vance.