History
In their study of the genre, Maggie Dunn and Ann Morris not that the form descends from two different traditions: There are texts that are themselves assembled from other texts, such as the way the tales from the Arthurian cycle is compiled in books by Chretien de Troyes, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Thomas Malory and the Mabinogion. Then there are the classic serialized novellas, many of them with frame stories; this genre includes One Thousand and One Nights, The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, etc. Dunn and Morris show how in the nineteenth century, the genre appeared in such forms as the village sketch collection (e.g., Our Village) and the patchwork collection (e.g., Louisa May Alcott's Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag).
J. Gerald Kennedy describes the proliferation of the genre in the twentieth century, attributing it in part to the desire "to renounce the organizing authority of an omniscient narrator, asserting instead a variety of voices or perspectives reflective of the radical subjectivity of modern experience. Kennedy finds this proliferation in keeping with modernism and its use of fragmentation, juxtaposition and simultaneism to reflect what the "multiplicity" that characterizes the century. Scholars such as James Nagel and Rocío G. Davis have pointed out that the story cycle has been very popular among ethnic U.S. authors. Davis argues that ethnic writers find the format useful "as a metaphor for the fragmentation and multiplicity of ethnic lives" insofar as it highights "the subjectivity of experience and understanding" by allowing "multiple impressionistic perspectives and fragmentation of simple linear history".
Read more about this topic: Short Story Cycle
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