Austen Balzac Beaconsfield Blackmore Borrow Brontë Bunyan Caine Cervantes Chateaubriand Cooper Daudet Defoe Dickens Doyle Dumas Fénelon Feuillet Fielding Gaskell Goldsmith Hugo Kingsley Le Sage Lever Lytton Macdonald Manzoni Meredith Reade Richardson Scott Shorthouse Sienkiewicz Stowe Thackeray Turgenieff Zola
=The short story=, as distinct from a story that is short, is a nineteenth-century development in fiction. During the last hundred years the magazines grew so rapidly in numbers and circulation that they could not depend entirely on continued stories; they had to have tales that would be complete in one number, which could be read at one sitting. The demand brought the needed solution, a story which instead of length, with intricate action and complex studies of personality, supplied rapid action, brilliantly imaginative description, and a terse portrayal of character. Scenes, persons, and events were stamped immediately on the reader's mind; the effect desired by the writer was attained by force and bold decision. Edgar Allan Poe was one of the first to excel in this field, utilizing his critical powers as well as sheer inspiration to meet the situation.
The variations in style and manner are as manifold in the short story as in the novel. Boccaccio, "The Arabian Nights," French Literature, and the "Gesta Romanorum" show the work of the Middle Ages, from mere anecdote with a moral tagged on, in the "Gesta," to the graceful prose poem of "Aucassin and Nicolete." Barrie, Brown, and Hawthorne do little more than draw quiet sketches of simple life, while Björnson, Eliot, Hardy, Harte, Irving, Kipling, Macleod, Maupassant, Stevenson, and Tolstoi deal powerfully with situations that bring home to us the force of fate which lurks hidden in petty incidents. Aldrich, Collins, Crawford, Hale, and Watson have all used this type of fiction effectively. Indeed, Hale's "Man Without a Country" drives home the idea of patriotism so vigorously that Italy recently issued a translation in an edition of a million copies for distribution to her army.
Like poetry and fiction, history emerges from the darkness of the unknown ages, at first no more than a boastful record of slaughter and usurpation, such as shows through the gloss and splendor of epic poetry. The sagas in "Norse Literature," the crisp record of invasion and conquest by Cæsar, and that of Josephus on the Roman conquest of the Jews are all of this type, a chronicle by an eyewitness of the succession of deeds that made up some event in a nation's life.