The Mini-Cycle

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While scholars have been studying the short story cycle for some time now, this book discusses a form that has never before been identified and named, let alone analyzed: the mini-cycle. A mini-cycle is a short story cycle made up, in most cases, of only two or three stories. This study looks at mini-cycles spanning the period from Anton Chekhov's little trilogy to the Alphinland stories in Margaret Atwood's Stone Mattress , including texts by such authors as Stephen Leacock, Alice Munro, Robert Olen Butler, and Clark Blaise. Consideration is also given to marginal examples, like Sherwood Anderson's Godliness--A Tale in Four Parts , which can be seen as one story or four distinct texts unified under one title, and to what is called the exploded mini-cycle: one whose component stories are published with intervening stories between them rather than consecutively. For each mini-cycle, the analysis is based on close reading of both the linking elements--character, imagery, symbolism, and so forth--and the rhetorical and aesthetic effects of the mini-cycle's being made up of distinct stories rather than constructed as one long narrative.