The Modern Short Story and Magazine Culture, 1880–1950

“The ’nineties was a good and stimulating period for a short-story writer,” wrote H. G. Wells in the introduction to his 1911 volume of short fiction, The Country of the Blind and Other Stories. “[N]o short story of the slightest distinction went for long unrecognised. . . . Short stories broke out everywhere.”¹ In Wells’s account, the fin de siècle saw the “outbreak” of the short story genre coinciding with a proliferation of new periodicals—the Pall Mall Budget (1868–1920), Longman’s Magazine (1882–1905), and Yellow Book (1894–1897) being among the titles he quotes—which offered newly expansive publication opportunities for short story writers. Elke D’hoker and Chris Mourant’s edited essay collection, The Modern Short Story and Magazine Culture, brings together recent scholarship on the intertwined fortunes of the short story and the literary magazine, tracing the development of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century short fiction in the context of...