LITERARY TERMS

Apuntes

LITERARY TERMS Short story : a prose narrative that is brief in nature. The short story also has many of the same characteristics of a novel including characters, setting, plot, a narrator and themes. However, due to length constraints, these characteristics and devices generally may not be as fully developed or as complex as those developed for a full-length novel. There are many authors well known for the short story including Edgar Allan Poe, Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway. According to the book Literary Terms by Karl Becksonand Arthur Ganz, “American writers since Poe, who first theorized on the structure and purpose of the short story, have paid considerable attention to the form” (257). The written “protocol” regarding what comprises a short versus a long story is vague. However, a general standard might be that the short story could be read in one sitting, as Poe once defined it. Plot: The structure and relationship of actions and events in a work of fiction. While the temporal order of events in the work constitutes the "story," we are speaking of plot rather than story as soon as we look at how these events relate to one another (a chain of events) and how they ar...