The Oxford Book of Scottish Short Stories (Oxford Books of Prose & Verse)
The modern short story is a child of the Romantic period in European literature, and because of Walter Scott, the era's most influential prose fiction writer, nowhere did it flourish more immediately than in Scotland. Oxford's new anthology of 44 Scottish stories begins with folktales, which, strictly speaking, are not short stories but whose orally influenced, vernacular style and common-person protagonists inspired the Romantics. The work includes a major Scott story ("The Two Drovers" ) and others by his principal contemporaries, James Hogg and John Galt, a couple of Stevenson tales, examples from the late-nineteenth-century Kailyard School of sentimental regional fiction and the reaction against it, and a panoply of twentieth-century short fiction. The fantastic matter of folktales occasionally returns, the Scotticism of the language varies from story to story (a small Scots glossary is appended), and the quality of the whole selection is very high.Ray Olson--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.