![]() ![]() Lohafer has noted that surprise endings are now in critical disrepute “because they exhibit a simple notion of plot that can easily become simplistic, formulaic, and trivial”. In the newspapers where the bulk of the stories were published at that time, hundreds of stories ended with a “twist-in-the-tail”. On the surprise ending, and its more (.)ĢAt the end of the nineteenth century, the surprise ending in particular came to epitomise the type of pleasure readers came to expect from the genre. 7 Ian Reid, The Short Story (London: Methuen, 1977), pp.Valerie Shaw, while discussing famous stories with a surprise ending makes (.) ![]() 4 In 1925, the Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky also paid particular attention to short stories’ endings. In his “Philosophy of Composition” (1846), an essay as famous as his review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice Told Tales, Edgar Allan Poe states that the whole short story is a kind of preparation for its ending, and insists that the writer should construct the story with its conclusion constantly in mind. 3 This idea has been present since the very beginnings of the genre. 1 Influenced by the seminal reflexions of Frank Kermode in The Sense of an Ending, 2 critics like John Gerlach, Per Winther, David Sheridan and Susan Lohafer have all argued that endings were of key importance in defining the short story. A story’s conclusion has often been thought of as an effective way of grasping the genre’s characteristic features, as well as to understand the ways that readers experience the genre. ![]() by Benjamin Sher (Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive Press (.)ġA whole body of contemporary criticism is dedicated to the analysis and appraisal of short stories’ endings.
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