Presentation on the short story project: On the Affordances of Mere Length

On Nov 6th, 2020, when Mark Algee-Hewitt, Anna Mukamal and J.D. Porter presented their latest work on the short story project: On the Affordances of Mere Length.

The latest stage of our short story project expands our exploration of the formal and narratological differences between short stories and novels. We not only supplement our small, control, corpus with additional texts, but also we expand our analysis to a corpus of 10,000 short stories from Women’s Magazines of the late 19th and 20th centuries and compare it to an equal sized corpus of novels. In addition to vastly expanding our analysis of character appearances, and textual similarity across the texts, this new corpus has allowed us to reach new conclusions about the history of the short story in the twentieth century. We will also present new results on the formal differences between endings of novels and endings of short stories.