Thematic Clusters
Modern Mythologies
These authors invoke ancient myth, fairy tale, and legend into modern frameworks for thematic and aesthetic purposes.
- Nathanael Hawthorne “Rappacini’s Daughter”
- Katherine Mansfield “The Garden Party”
- Karen Russell “Vampires in the Lemon Grove”
- Bruno Schulz “Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass”
- F. Scott Fitzgerald “Babylon Revisited”
- Sheila Watson “Antigone”
- Leon Rooke “The Bolt of White Cloth”
- Alistair Macleod “As Birds Bring Forth the Sun”
- Angela Carter “In the Company of Wolves”
- Maxine Hong Kingston “On Mortality”
- Thomas King “The One About Coyote Going West”
- Louise Erdrich “Fleur”
Politicized Fictions
These authors focus on problematic social and political structures, particularly with regard to classist, racial and/or ethnic tensions.
- Elena Poniatowska “The Night Visitor”
- Austin Clarke “Leaving This Island Place”
- Thomas King “The One About Coyote Going West”
- Richard Wright “The Man Who Was Almost a Man”
- F. Scott Fitzgerald “Babylon Revisited”
- William Faulkner “Pantaloon in Black”
- Flannery O’Connor “Revelation”
- Chinua Achebe “Civil Peace”
- Nadine Gordimer “Is There Nowhere Else We Can Meet?”
- Woody Allen “The Kugelmass Episode”
- Maxine Hong Kingston “On Morality”
- Emma Lee Warrior “Compatriots”
- Thomas King “The One About Coyote Going West”
- Dionne Brand “Photograph”
- Anne Enright “Yesterday’s Weather”
- George Saunders “Victory Lap”
- Don DeLillo “Baader-Meinhof”
- Edwidge Danticat “Between the Pool and the Gardenias”
- Louise Erdrich “Fleur”
- Tobias Wolff “Casualty”
Religion, Worship and Radical Belief Systems
- Flannery O’Connor “Revelation”
- Robert Stone “Misere”
- Marie-Claire Blais “The Foresaken”
- Maxine Hong Kingston “On Morality”
Women’s Experience
These authors write narratives of womanhood or employ strong feminist and/or distinct feminine perspectives to discuss the role of women in their respective societies.
- James Joyce “The Dead”
- Kate Chopin “Beyond the Bayou”
- Sara Jeannette Duncan “The Pool in the Desert”
- Katherine Mansfield “The Garden Party”
- Sheila Watson “Antigone”
- Tillie Olsen “I Stand Here Ironing”
- Doris Lessing “A Man and Two Women”
- Mavis Gallant “In Youth Is Pleasure” “Voices Lost in Snow”
- William Trevor “The Piano Tuner’s Wives
- Nadine Gordimer “Is There Nowhere Else We Can Meet?”
- Toni Morrison “Recitatif”
- Alice Munro “Fits” “Open Secrets”
- Elena Poniatowska “The Night Visitor”
- Angela Carter “The Company of Wolves”
- Sandra Birdsell “The Wednesday Circle”
- Barbara Gowdy “We So Seldom Look On Love”
- Elizabeth Hay “The Friend”
- Louise Erdrich “Fleur”
- George Saunders “Victory Lap”
- Sarah Hall “She Murdered Mortal He”
- Don DeLillo “Baader-Meinhof”
- Anne Enright “Yesterday’s Weather”
- Karen Russell “Vampires in the Lemon Grove”
- Edwidge Danticat “Between the Pool and the Gardenias”
- Sherman Alexie “This Is What It Means To Say Phoenix, Arizona”
Freudian Psychoanalytic Criticism
- Edgar Allen Poe “The Fall of the House of Usher”
- Albert Camus “The Guest”
- D.H. Lawrence “The Prussian Officer”
- James Joyce “The Dead” “Encounters”
- Bruno Schulz “Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass”
- Woody Allen “The Kugelmass Episode”
- F. Scott Fitzgerald “Babylon Revisited”
- Mavis Gallant “In Youth Is Pleasure” “Voices Lost in Snow”
- Samuel Becket “Imagination Dead Imagine”
- Robert Stone “Miserere”
- Anne Enright “ Yesterday’s Weather”
Stories in Conversation
- F. Scott Fitzgerald “Babylon Revisited” // Ernest Hemingway “A Clean Well-Lighted Place” [The expatriate experience]
- Gustav Flaubert // Henry James [Emerging realism]
- Alistair MacLeod // Gabriel Garcia Marquez [The birth of the story]
- Margaret Atwood “Death By Landscape” // Jane Urquhart “The Death of Robert Browning” [Nature, environment, and the death of the artist]
- Hawthorne “Rappacini’s Daughter” // Karen Russell “Vampires in the Lemon Grove” [Gardens and the representation of nature]
- D.H. Lawrence // Katherine Mansfield [Utopia]
The Pictorial: Paintings, Drawings, and Photography in Short Fiction
- Bruno Schulz “Sanitorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass”
- John Berger “Islington”
- Don DeLillo “Baader-Meinhof”
- Margaret Atwood “Death by Landscape”
- Dionne Brand “Photograph”
- Jane Urquhart “The Death of Robert Browning”
Postmodern Diaspora
- Austin Clarke “Leaving This Island Place”
- Josef Skvorecky “panta rei”
- Dionne Brand “Photograph”
- Anita Desai “Surface Textures”
- Chinua Achebe “Civil Peace”
- Maxine Hong Kingston “On Morality”
- Emma Lee Warrior “Compatriots”