The modern short story emerged almost simultaneously in Germany, the United States, France, and Russia. In Germany there had been relatively little difference between the stories of the late 18th century and those in the older tradition of Boccaccio. In 1795 Goethe contributed a set of stories to Friedrich Schiller's journal, Die Horen, that were obviously created with the Decameron in mind. Significantly, Goethe did not call them "short stories" (Novellen) although the term was available to him. Rather, he thought of them as "entertainments" for German travelers (Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten). Friedrich Schlegel's early discussion of the short narrative form, appearing soon after Goethe's "entertainments," also focused on Boccaccio (Nachrichten von den poetischen Werken des G. Boccaccio, 1801).
But a new type of short fiction was near at hand-a type that accepted some of the realistic properties of popular journalism. In 1827, 32 years after publishing his own "entertainments," Goethe commented on the difference between the newly emergent story and the older kind. "What is a short story," he asked, "but an event which, though unheard of, has occurred? Many a work which passes in Germany under the title 'short story' is not a short story at all, but merely a tale or what else you would like to call it." Two influential critics, Christoph Wieland and Friedrich Schleiermacher, also argued that a short story properly concerned itself with events that actually happened or could happen. A short story, for them, had to be realistic.
Perhaps sensitive to this qualification, Heinrich von Kleist and E.T.A. Hoffmann called their short works on fabulous themes "tales" (Erzählungen). Somewhat like Poe, Kleist created an expression of human problems, partly metaphysical and partly psychological, by dramatizing humankind's confrontations with a fantastic, chaotic world. Hoffmann's intriguing tales of exotic places and of supernatural phenomena were very likely his most influential. Another important writer, Ludwig Tieck, explicitly rejected realism as the definitive element in a short story. As he noted in his preface to the 1829 collection of his works and as he demonstrated in his stories, Tieck envisioned the short story as primarily a matter of intensity and ironic inversion. A story did not have to be realistic in any outward sense, he claimed, so long as the chain of consequences was "entirely in keeping with character and circumstances." By allowing the writer to pursue an inner, and perhaps bizarre, reality and order, Tieck and the others kept the modern story open to nonjournalistic techniques.
In the United States, the short story, as in Germany, evolved in two strains. On the one hand there appeared the realistic story that sought objectively to deal with seemingly real places, events, or persons. The regionalist stories of the second half of the 19th century (including those by George W. Cable, Bret Harte, Sarah Orne Jewett) are of this kind. On the other hand, there developed the impressionist story, a tale shaped and given meaning by the consciousness and psychological attitudes of the narrator. Predicated upon this element of subjectivity, these stories seem less objective and are less realistic in the outward sense. Of this sort are Poe's tales in which the hallucinations of a central character or narrator provide the details and facts of the story. Like the narrators in "The Tell-Tale Heart" (1843) and "The Imp of the Perverse" (1845), the narrator of "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839) so distorts and transforms what he sees that the reader cannot hope to look objectively at the scene. Looking through an intermediary's eyes, the reader can see only the narrator's impressions of the scene.
Some writers contributed to the development of both types of story. Washington Irving wrote several realistic sketches (The Sketch Book, 1819–20; The Alhambra, 1832) in which he carefully recorded appearances and actions. Irving also wrote stories in which the details were taken not from ostensible reality but from within a character's mind. Much of the substance of "The Stout Gentleman" (1821), for example, is reshaped and recharged by the narrator's fertile imagination; "Rip Van Winkle" (1819) draws upon the symbolic surreality of Rip's dreams.
The short prose of Nathaniel Hawthorne illustrates that neither type of modern story, however, has exclusive rights to the use of symbol. On a few occasions, as in "My Kinsman, Major Molineux" (1832), Hawthorne's stories are about symbolic events as they are viewed subjectively by the central character. Hawthorne's greater gift, however, was for creating scenes, persons, and events that strike the reader as being actual historical facts and also as being rich in symbolic import. "Endicott and the Red Cross" (1837) may seem little more than a photographic sketch of a tableau out of history (the 17th-century Puritan leader cuts the red cross of St. George out of the colonial flag, the first act of rebellion against England), but the details are symbols of an underground of conflicting values and ideologies.
