Abstract

This chapter explores the short story in Ireland and Britain from the 1960s to the present. It traces the short story’s relations to realism and the avant garde, and follows its path from the stylistic experimentalism of the postmodern, with its concomitant expressions of hybridity and excess, to contemporary explorations of the fragmentation, yearning and separation symptomatic of life in a global, digital age. The independent and yet interconnected narratives of the Irish and British short story and the publishing industry are laid out, as are the form’s use by feminist writers and marginalised communities.