Perrine’s Story and Structure. Ed. Thomas R. Arp and Greg Johnson. Tenth ed. Boston: Thomson-Heinle, 2002. Print.
We do not usually review textbooks, but we read this one from cover to cover. Story and Structure is a short story anthology geared for college classes. However, a key selling point makes it worthwhile for high school teachers and, possibly, high school students as well.
There are eight chapters focusing on a specific aspect of reading fiction such as story, plot, characterization, theme, point of view, symbol, irony, and critique. Each chapter begins with key definitions and examples—these can be helpful to the student or teacher even if they are studying different works from those in this anthology. Then each chapter has three to five short stories to illustrate the theme.
These eight chapters are followed by three chapters focusing on three authors known for their short fiction: Anton Chekhov, Flannery O’Connor, and Joyce Carol Oates. Besides three stories from each author, there are some excerpts from the authors’ work about their own writing and from literary criticism on most of the stories.
These chapters are followed by a very helpful and specific chapter on how to write literary criticism. The book builds.
The books ends with about a dozen more short stories not arranged in any kind of thematic order. I counted a total of 46 stories. All but one are worth reading. There is a good variety, though they tend to be serious—the few with some humor provided needed comic relief. Even then, much of the humor was on the dark side, e.g., Flannery O’Connor or Edith Wharton.
Of the stories in the collection that were new to this reader, I got a big kick out of “Roman Fever” by Edith Wharton. The plot has several clever twists as two society ladies play a game of social one-upsmanship. Like any good story, even an ironic one, there are subtle hints which point to its outcome, but it is still a surprise ending for most readers.
Flannery O’Connor’s “A Late Encounter with the Enemy” satirizes the love affair many Southerners have with Gone with the Wind and its rose-colored look at the ante-bellum South and the Civil War. Having just read Confederates in the Attic, this story demonstrated that not everyone from Georgia ate that stuff up.
The editors include Poe and Hawthorne—often seen as the developers of the modern literary short story. Their book includes some less subtle material like O. Henry and “The Most Dangerous Game.” It goes through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries up to contemporary writers like Jhumpa Lahiri.
As a textbook, this would work very well for a short story class or short story writing class. The study material could be useful to teachers and students in a variety of situations and contexts. The stories are worth reading. If nothing else, Story and Structure gives us a sense of the kind of prose fiction that is valued in academic circles today.