Scottish Women’s Short Stories: The Interplay of Form, Content and Context in the Work of Janice Galloway, A. L. Kennedy and Ali Smith
Ines Maria Gstrein
Janice Galloway, A.L. Kennedy and Ali Smith have published numerous short story collections since the 1990s. They stand in a long line of Scottish women short story writers (Lumsden 2000: 157). With the literary breakthrough of Muriel Spark and Elspeth Davie in the late 1950s, “the short story really becomes the dominant form in which women in Scotland write” (Baker 2022). Although their short stories form part of university curricula, are praised by literary critics and have won prizes, research on Galloway, Kennedy and Smith tends to focus on the novelistic output of the authors.
Apart from providing the first book-length comprehensive study of Galloway’s, Kennedy’s and Smith’s short story collections, I aim to contribute to the growing area of research into the fragmented nature of contemporary writing. Literary works which veer towards one of the endpoints of the “panorama of short story cycles” (Ingram 1971: 14) – that is, toward the short story collection or the composite novel – have been less frequently examined than the short story cycle proper (D’hoker 2018: 21). I will apply different theoretical lenses (e.g., Levine’s network clusters, Lundén’s patchworks and Weiss’s mini-cycles) to explore linking structures at the microlevel of short fiction volumes.
The (lacks of) linkages between short stories are an affordance of form that many short story collections display. New formalist Caroline Levine adapts the term “affordance” for literary studies in order to “describe the potential uses or actions latent in materials and designs” (2015: 6). Recent scholarship in short fiction criticism has started to investigate the usefulness of new formalist thought for the study of integrated volumes of short fiction (e.g., Gill and Kläger 2018: 2). In my dissertation project, I would like to use “affordance” as a lens to examine the constraints and the possibilities of form by drawing connections between short story collections and broader sociocultural circumstances.