The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story

Rating:
Summary: An influential but grotesquely dated work
Review: There have been few fulllength studies of the short story, and Frank O'Connor's was one of the first and remains among the most influential. But it has held up miserably over the years. Even granted that he published the work in 1962, was it really necessary for O'Connor to refer so patronizingly to Katherine Mansfield as "the brassy little shopgirl of literature"? Or to treat Joyce's DUBLINERS as if it had been written in lightning on the summit of Mt. Sinai? (Of a sentence from "The Sisters," O'Connor writes, "You may play about as you please with alternatives to this phrase; you will find no combination of adjectives that will produce a similar effect, nor any way of reading the passage that will produce a different one.") Objectivity goes straight out the window; as a result, this study is much more useful as a picture of the literary attitudes of O'Connor's time than it is as any sort of rigorous study of the form it purports to analyze.