Narrative Progression in the Short Story: A Corpus Stylistic Approach

Linguistic Approaches to Literature #6

by Michael Toolan

In this book, a combination of corpus analysis and reader-response testing is used to support an account of how such fundamental elements of narrativity as reader-perception of suspense, surprise, secrets, and gaps are created in representative twentieth-century short stories.

256 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 2008

Reviews

[A L]

Extremely preliminary but still detailed; the discussion of abridging stories by the most statistically significant words and clusters was fascinating, and the discovery of extremely subtle links of formulation in Alice Munro's stories is extremely illuminating on the architecture of her work.