Short Story in America: an Evolution

As we know story telling is one of the oldest human activities and we can find its roots in oral narratives, fairytales, folk tales, and books of history. Many people thus claimed that short story began as moral and religiousshort stories. They start transferring their daily life events if the earliest pieces of literature left out as Dream ofthe Rood or Seafarer , these pieces will examine what were the concerns of people and what the motif behindproducing such texts is. They quickly come to the point that they want to record their daily life events, theyseem to be facing a hostile universe, floods, earthquakes, and etc; therefore, they gradually start thinking thathow can I preserve my identity? As a sort of communication, these pieces of literature were in a form of poetrythe reason is that people of that time could not read and write; therefore, the kind of literature that we had attime was the oral literature. Meanwhile, there is a tendency toward short story appears. Though in old Englishwe have Geoffrey Chaucer and ''Canterbury Tales'' as an example of short story, many people claim that shortstory began in 19th. Century when the early settlers of America landed on the land and thought how they canreproduce their own literature; therefore, short story is an American production. The present essay intends toshow how the formulaic qualities of short story have been developed and changed over time.

کلیدواژه ها:

oral literature ، poetry ، short story