Beginning in the 1890s, reaching its first full realization by modernist writers in the 1920s, and brought to its heyday during the Canadian Renaissance starting in the 1960s, the short story has become Canada's flagship genre. It continues to attract the country's most accomplished and innovative writers today, among them Margaret Atwood, Mavis Gallant, Alice Munro, Clark Blaise, and many others. Yet in contrast to the stature and popularity of the genre and the writers who partake in it, surprisingly little literary criticism has been devoted to the Canadian short story. This book begins the process of redressing that imbalance by providing the first collection of critical interpretations of a range of thirty well-known and often-anthologized Canadian short stories from the genre's beginnings through the twentieth century; due to the genre's outstanding vitality and productivity since the 1960s, the larger part of the volume is devoted to stories from that period. A historical survey of the genre introduces the volume and a timeline comparing the genre's development in Canada, the US, and Great Britain via representative examples completes it. The contributors are German and Austrian Canadian Studies specialists whose diversity of approaches to the variety of authors, themes, and styles testifies to the versatility of the Canadian short story and its paramount role in the history of Canadian literature. Geared both to specialists in and to students of Canadian literature, it is of particular benefit to the latter because it provides not only a collection of interpretations, but a comprehensive introduction to the history of the Canadian short story. Reingard M. Nischik is professor and chair of American Literature at the University of Constance, Germany. Among her numerous publications are the pioneering book she co-edited with Robert Kroetsch in 1985, Gaining Ground: European Critics on Canadian Literature, and other edited volumes for Camden House, including Margaret Atwood: Works and Impact (2000), and History of Literature in Canada: English-Canadian and French-Canadian (2008).
