Year: 2017
Type: article
Abstract: In the fall of 1 997, Lidia Jorge published a volume of collected short stories under the title Marido e Outros Contos.Bringing together seven brief narratives that had been previously published in magazines, anthologies, or independently as individual stories, this collection was welcomed by Jorge's readers who saw it as providing a new opportunity to partake of the author's imaginative process and, perhaps, to find new approaches to assessing her previous work.Indeed, much of this volume's initial critical reception focused on the manner in which these stories could be understood as complements to the novels that have made Jorge's literary reputation or as a practice ground for future literary endeavors.In a review published in the weekly newspaper Expresso , Jose Nobre da Silveira offered such general observations as "o conto e, de facto, (...) lugar de acumula^ao de tentativas que, de uma ou de outra forma, ilumina a obra maior do romancista," and that "ele sera, na maior parte das circunstancias, o espelho da obra do romancista."Maria Alzira Seixo, on the other hand, commented in the Jornal de Letras that the incidents captured in the author's short stories seemed to beg for treatment in lengthier, more fully developed fictional forms: "Por um lado, Lidia Jorge escreve contos que podem considerar-se argumentos de uma ficc^ao mais extensa, sem que por isso tenhamos que lamentar a sua brevidade" (24).In seeking to interpret these stories as comments on Jorge's fictional universe, as reflections of her novels, or as experimental terrain for future projects, these approaches to Lidia Jorge's short stories move beyond a simple comparison of specific texts written by a single author to participate in a conceptual exercise that focuses on the difference between or hierarchy of genres.More specifically, these critics, like many before them, implicitly privilege the novel genre over that of the short story.In an essay entitled "The
DOI: 10.62791/t06kbt52
Author: Ellen W. Sapega
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4401250437