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On "Woolf's literary impressionism," Ann Banfield asserts, "Katherine Mansfield was the decisive influence yet exemplified Impressionism's limits" ("Time Passes" 471) Mansfield never achieved "a post-impressionist 'modern fiction,'" not even in "Prelude" or "At the Bay." But Banfield overlooks Mansfield's elaboration of an alternative postimpressionism that consists not in Woolfian design in which moments are crystallized and kaleidoscopically arranged, but rather in visions of an incipient, preternatural motility. Mansfield's postimpressionism, less formally complex than Woolf's, is more metaphysical. Its most vibrant instance lies within the tidal pool in "At the Bay," a tidal pool taken over, stilled, and solemnized by Woolf for the beach-combing scene in To the Lighthouse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article defines the short story. That there is no large and distinguished corpus of short story theory because the short story does not exist as a discrete and independent genre is a hypothesis that ought to be taken seriously on occasion, if only to contemplate the perspective the hypothesis provides. A structuralist conception of fiction tends to confirm the suspicion that there may be no rational way to distinguish "short story" from other narratives in the same mimetic mode: all stories, short and long, have certain required properties of narrativity.