The Integrated Short Story Collection: Caught between genre and mode

Abstract

Scholars, Anglo Saxon in the main, have considered the short story cycle/ sequence as the result of the emergence of the narrative of destabilization (community, region, form and temporality) relegating the hybrid genre to the aesthetics of modernism and to the poetics of identity. The present contribution brings a novel approach and argues for the nineteenth century origin of the cycle/sequence as a result of the clash between genre (conto) and mode (prose realism) in the last quarter of the Portuguese nineteenth century. After a succinct overview of the main theories, phototypias do Minho is studied by way of illustration.
In the conclusion suggestions are made for a possible revisionary literary history of nineteenth century Portuguese prose fiction.