Seminar in the Writing of Fiction

ENGL 309/609: Spring 2005
Tuesdays, 1:00-3:52 Coleman 219

Robert Love Taylor
Hours TBA
Office: Carnegie 201
email: rtaylor@bucknell.edu

Online Resources

Short Story Classics: A growing collection of significant, generally formative works of short fiction, from Cervantes to Hawthorne to Hemingway and Mansfield and Porter. Most represented are from the late 19th and first half of the 20th century--the heyday of the genre.

The Short Story: a chronology. While necessarily selective and incomplete, this is a respectable stab at trying to represent a time-line history of the form.

Chekhov: A gold mine. Stories by Chekhov online, including "Misery," "Gooseberries," and "The Darling." See also, Chekhov on Writing:a selection of remarks on the art of fiction and advice given by Chekhov to other writers. Highly recommended.

James Joyce! Lord have mercy, saints protect us. Here's Dubliners, complete with "Araby," "The Boarding House," "A Little Cloud," and, arguably the finest story in the language, "The Dead." Writers, ignore these stories at your peril.

"Paul's Case": the famous short story by Willa Cather.

"The Jolly Corner": The short story by Henry James. Be patient with this one. James isn't easy.

Project Bartleby: A source for online texts of stories by Anderson (all of Winesburg, Ohio), Maupassant, Hawthorne ("Rappaccini's Daughter"), Melville, and Virginia Woolf, among others.

Hudson Fiction: eleven classic short stories, helpfully annotated, including Kafka's "Metamorphosis."

West Branch: The homepage for Bucknell's international literary magazine, with sample poems and stories from several back issues.

American Literature on the Web: Lots of "classic" writers represented here (you can find Stephen Crane's "The Blue Hotel," for example).

Poets and Writers:The online version of a highly useful magazine, with many interesting articles by writers and much practical information.

Punctuation Review: an excellent source for reviewing such mundane (but essential) matters as how to use commas, quotation marks, dashes, semicolons, and the like.

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