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This book puts the short story at the heart of contemporary postcolonial studies and questions what postcolonial literary criticism may be. Focusing on short fiction between 1975 and today – the period in which critical theory came to determine postcolonial studies – it argues for a sophisticated critique exemplified by the ambiguity of the form.

In Trespassing Boundaries, ten contemporary Woolf scholars discuss a broad range of Woolf's short stories. Despite being now easily available these stories have not yet received the attention they deserve. Complex yet involving, they deserve to be read not only for the light they shed on the novels, but in their own right, as major contributions to the short fiction as a genre. This volume places Woolf's short stories in the context of modernist experimentalism, then explores them as ambitious attempts to challenge generic boundaries, undercutting traditional distinctions between short fiction and the novel, between experimental and popular fiction, between fiction and nonfiction. Collectively the essays suggest that Woolf's contribution to the short story is as important as her contribution to the novel.

H.G. Wells is justly famous as a writer of short stories, but for too long the originality of his contribution in this field has been unacknowledged. The present study argues that in his short stories Wells was not simply emulating the styles and themes of his predecessors but making a distinctive contribution to the genre grounded firmly in his approach to fiction. The study demonstrates that Wells's short stories merit far closer critical attention than they have yet received and possess considerable psychological and symbolic insight.