Short Story Genre
Short of asking the deans of various English Literature departmentswhy they have virtually removed the women's short story genre fromcoursework, perhaps another way to get at an answer is to review the statusof "women's lit" generally in the society. A very basic place to start(and one isn't arguing that it is literature in the same class of art withthe aforementioned short stories) is with romance novels. In 1999, 41million Americans read a romance novel. It made up 38.4 percent of alladult popular fiction sold in1998, and more than 54 percent of allpaperbacks. These figures dwarfed sales of science fiction (which onemight reasonably call half of men's lit), mysteries, Westerns (arguably the
And, in the words of one critic, ". They tend to be working- to middle-class, and their incomes were, in 2000, between $10,000 and $35,000 peryear. (Williams, 2000) In order to make the leap from the wildly impressive sales of fluffyfantasies to proposing a reason for the dearth of women's' short storystudies, one must accept that the academic community would not regard thedemographics above as anything even faintly resembling those they expect intheir classrooms. (Williams, 2000) Despite this, famous romance authors such as Nora Roberts are notcompared to Hemingway. Thefact that Bridget Jones identified with Jane Austen's Mr. " (Marsh,2004) In short, Bridget Jones emerges a buffoon. A successor to a long line offeminine narrators that goes back as far as Smollett and Richardson, Jonesappears to "lack control over her narrative and its ironies. And of course, making amovie from the book starring an actress who, until then, was considered alightweight didn't help establish much of anything about a slightly higher(arguably) level of women's fiction in the minds of any academician. Bridget Jones's Diary is a case in point. " Women's short fiction was very likely propped up by ardent feminism. It is possible, in fact, that the very popularity of lightweightwomen's' fiction has harmed the reception of serious women's fiction. And because women's fiction of any kind is, a priori,women's, there is reason to believe that by virtue of the word alone,women's short fiction is given short shrift by serious scholars. Perhaps this is because the readers are older, with32 percent over 65 and half over 45.
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Acceptance Essays
