DEFINING THE SHORT STORY: IMPRESSIONISM AND FORM.

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.