Short story world : the nineteenth-century American masters

The advent of the short story in the nineteenth century highlights the fact that writers needed other channels of expression different from the novel in order to pour into them a vision of experience which does not "novelise" life into a chaptered biography of forward (or backward) movement. In America, authors such as Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Harte, Twain or Sarah Orne Jewett looked at brevity as a condition of coherence, a model of intelligibility at odds with the notion that life is a long path which only the novel can fully represent.