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The short-story cycle — a literary genre as ancient as A Thousand and One Nights and as modern as James Joyce’s Dubliners — has rapidly ascended over the last twenty years to become one of the dominant forms in American fiction. Most scholars and book reviewers, however, lack awareness of the short-story cycle’s rich legacy in this country and consistently misconstrue new works of the genre as “novels.” James Nagel offers the first systematic history and definition of the story cycle as exemplified in contemporary American fiction, bringing attention to the format’s wide appeal among various ethnic groups.
Differentiating the cycle from the more tightly unified novel on one side and the less coherent story collection on the other, Nagel examines in detail eight recent manifestations of the short-story cycle genre: Love Medicine, by Louise Erdrich; Annie John, by Jamaica Kincaid; Monkeys, by Susan Minot; The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros; The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien; How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, by Julia Alvarez; The Joy Luck Club, by Amy Tan; and Robert Olen Butler’s A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain. Written from a variety of ethnic perspectives, these books depict the process of immigration, acculturation, language acquisition, identity formation, and integration of old world values with new. With its concentric as opposed to linear plot development possibilities, the cycle, Nagel shows, lends itself particularly well to exploring these themes, which mirror some of the major issues facing American society today.
James Nagel is the J. O. Eidson Distinguished Professor of American Literature at the University of Georgia, founder of the journal Studies in American Fiction, and cofounder of the American Literature Association. Among his previous books are Stephen Crane and Literary Impressionism; Ernest Hemingway: The Oak Park Legacy; and, with Henry s. Villard, Hemingway in Love and War: The Lost Diary of Agnes von Kurowsky.
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