Historical fiction is generally associated with the novel (see Green [2011] and Young [2018]). Yet the historical short story was significant before WWI: “from 1901 to 1914, over 1200 works of historical fiction were issued, of which nearly a quarter were short-story collections” (Cox and Adrian 1994, xiv). We may wonder if and how the genre has been impacted by the renewed interest in the past and history in fiction over the past 30 years.

David Malcolm considers that “the historical short story is a minor genre of the short story” (2012, 72). He muses, “Perhaps the short story is just too short to perform the reconstructionist task that the historical novel has always set itself” (72), and concludes his very brief overview by saying that despite major writers’ incursions in the subgenre, “the short story form seems to be largely inimical to the historical imagination” (73). Counter-examples may immediately spring to mind: Joseph Conrad’s historical short stories such as ‘The Duel’, A.S. Byatt’s novellas in Angels and Insects, Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, Emma Donoghue’s collection The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits, Lucy Caldwell’s “Daylight Raids” in Openings, some of the stories in Carys Davis’s Some New Ambush or Jan Carson’s stories in relation to the Troubles in Northern Ireland etc.

The fact that the historical short story has received “almost no critical attention as a specific genre”, Diana Wallace suggests, with “very little attempt to theorise the difference between the historical novel and the historical story”, is partly to do with “assumptions about the short story being a ‘minor form’” (2013, 13). What little critical attention has been paid to historical short fiction focuses on the impact of brevity on form and content. For instance, George Green points out: “Historical short story writers cannot use extended description and leisurely exposition to achieve their effects; they must therefore use devices, short cuts and elisions to do so” (Green 62). This may bring us to wonder with Gavin Jones: “what kind of history do we receive within the spatial and temporal limitations of a short story? Do we simply get “less” history, a miniature version, or is it inherently history of a different type?” (Jones 103-104). Wallace suggests that in the context of Lukácsian theorisations of the historical novel, the historical story looks “like an anomaly, even an impossibility” yet it has offered women writers the freedoms of a more open form (2013, 70, 71). We can envisage with Emma Young the potentionally subversive effect of the short story format on historical fiction when she suggests that its brevity is one of the reasons “the short story often works against the grain of a totalising narrative of history, subjectivity and knowledge, marking it out as a potentially subversive genre” (Young 15).

This special issue will interrogate these statements in stories and novellas from Britain and Ireland, taking into account the changeable form of historical fiction, be it traditional, metafictional or neo-historical.

We are looking for papers that will explore the uses of history in short fiction throughout the twentieth-century into the twenty-first. We welcome papers exploring modernist revisions of the historical story, discussing late twentieth-century historiographic metafiction, or considering how twenty-first century short stories and novellas accommodate, or not, recent trends in neo-historical fiction which interrogate the past through a contemporary lens, striving for accuracy as it imagines a story for previously invisible, untold or undertold histories.

Selective Bibliography

Barbour, Catherine, and Karonika Kardak, eds. “New Directions in Contemporary Women’s Historical Fiction.” Women’s Historical Fiction Across the Globe. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2025. 1-18. Print.

Cox, Michael, and Jack Adrian, eds. Introduction. The Oxford Book of Historical Stories. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994. ix-xvii. Print.

Green, George. “Orcs on Mars: Historical Fiction and the Short Story.” Short Fiction in Theory & Practice 1. 1 (2011): 59-69. Print.

Harris, Katherine.“‘Part of the project of that book was not to be authentic’: Neo-historical Authenticity and its Anachronisms in Contemporary Historical Fiction.” Rethinking History 21.2 (2017): 193-212. Print.

Jones, Gavin. “Historical Fiction, World-Building, and the Short Story.” Historical Fiction Now. Eds. Mark Eaton and Bruce Holsinger. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2023. 101-17. Print.

Malcolm, David. “The Historical Short Story.” The British and Irish Short Story Handbook.Oxford: Blackwell, 2012. 72-74. Print.

Patea, Viorica. “The Short Story: An Overview of the History and Evolution of the Genre.” Short Story Theories: A Twenty-first Century Perspective. Leiden: Brill, 2012. 1-26.Print.

Rousselot, Elodie, ed. Exoticizing the Past in Contemporary Neo-Historical Fiction. London: Palgrave, 2014.Print.

Wallace, Diana. Female Gothic Histories: Gender, History in the Gothic. Cardiff: U of Wales P, 2013. Print.

Young, Emma. Contemporary Feminism and Women’s Short Stories. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2018. Print.

Suggestions for Proposals

This special issue of the Journal of the Short Story in English

proposes to examine the 20th -21st-century historical short story in Britain and Ireland. We are looking for research papers in the form of essays (not exceeding 48,000 signs). Topics contributors might discuss include, but are not limited, to the following:

• history in modernist short fiction

• neo-historical short fiction

• the subversive dimension of historical short fiction

• history and imagination

• historical short fiction as a hybrid form

• the aesthetics of history in short fiction

• identities

• uses of anachronism

Practical Details

The editors invite abstracts of about 500 words in English. Please email your abstract with a short biographical note (100 words max) to armelle.parey@unicaen.fr and diana.wallace@southwales.ac.ukby 15 September 2026. Notification of provisional acceptance will be given by 30 September 2026. The completed papers will be due by the end of January 2027. They will be peer-reviewed. The style sheet and guidelines for authors are available on the JSSE website: https://journals.openedition.org/jsse/234.