If only I knew: The stranger in the twentieth-century short story.

摘要

The purpose of this study is to explore the variations of the stranger motif in American twentieth-century short fiction and to create five original works that represent my understanding of the genre. The appearance of the stranger is a common story structure found throughout the history of American literature and it continues to appear in contemporary American short stories. In his work Enter Mysterious Stranger: American Cloistral Fiction , Roy R. Male argues that a strain of the mysterious stranger genre is particularly indigenous to American society. Increasing developments in technology and social relations continue to allow Americans greater freedom and mobility, assuring the future significance of the mysterious stranger in American fiction as well. By examining the short works of Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O'Connor, Raymond Carver, and David James Duncan, this study highlights the variations of the key aspects of the stranger genre and discusses the role the elements play in the construction of the story. Observations in this study fall into three basic categories: Character, Conflict, and Theme. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).