The Short Story - General introduction

  

        Short story generally means ''A story which is short''. Short story is a form or genre having rules its own. One of the most successful short story writer of our time, H. E. Bates wrote,

The basis of almost every argument or conclusion I can make the axiom that short story  can  be anything that the author decides it shall be. 

          The shortest of short stories may be no more than a page or two in length; some short stories run to over a hundred pages like, D. H. Lawernce's St Mawr for instance. It's too impossible to draw a line between the long short story and the short novel. It is sometimes go under the name of 'Novella' for the doubtful examples. The Novella is a different from the genuine short novel in its smaller number of characters, its less varied setting and its simple plot. Let's look at some of the examples of this kind of doubtful writing;

• Lawrence's tales; like The captain's doll and The virgin and the gipsy
• Henry James's The turn of the screw 
• Maugham's Rain                                                                                                                                           

H. G. Wells himself was a master of the short story teller's art, says that,

A short story is, or should be a simple thing; it aims at producing one single vivid effect; it has seize the attention at the outset, and never relaxing, get it together the more and more until the climates it reached. The limits of the human capacity to attend closely therefore set limit to it; it must explode and finish before interruption occurs or fatigue sets in.

      According to critics and historian, in the short story there is something new - a product of the 19th century and the first half of the twentieth.