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Minimalism and the Short Story - Raymond Carver, Amy Hempel, and Mary Robison

Author: 
Year:
Pages:168
ISBN:0-7734-7936-8
978-0-7734-7936-4
Price:$159.95
This work addresses minimalism as demonstrating a parallel poetics to that of the short story, and analyses many works of short fiction by Raymond Carver, Amy Hempel, and Mary Robison that reflect this relationship. Very little academic scholarship addresses Literary Minimalism in positive terms. This work traces the evolution of literary minimalism as a by-product of the development of the modern short story.

Reviews

“In addition to providing us with intriguing and revealing analyses of three influential and representative writers of the latest ‘minimalist’ phase of the American short story, Professor Hallett makes it clear that the very same kind of brick-bats that were hurled against minimalism in the late seventies and early eighties are much the same slings and arrows that have constituted the outrageous fortune of the short story as a genre throughout its history. . . Consequently we welcome this thoughtfully sound corrective to previous critical glibness and snobbishness about the short story in our generation. . . Finally, any book that might possibly alert the American reading public to Mary Robison, one of the two greatest, and most underestimated, contemporary American writers. . . gets my enthusiastic endorsement.” – Charles E. May

Table of Contents

Table of contents: Preface
Introduction: Minimalism and the Short Story
1. Parallel Poetics
2. Tracing the Roots of Minimalism
3. Raymond Carver
4. Amy Hempel
5. Mary Robison
6. Conclusion and Synthesis
Works Cited, Index