SOURCE: "John Fowles, 'The Enigma' and the Contemporary British Short Story," in Modes of Narrative, Approaches to American, Canadian and British Fiction, edited by Reingard M. Nischik and Barbara Korte, Königshausen & Neumann, 1990, pp. 179-89.

Below, Broich analyzes "The Enigma " in the context of the mimetic and aesthetic traditions of British short fiction, acknowledging the story's seminal influence on the postmodern, experimental short story form.

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If you were to ask professors of English literature to name a few contemporary British short stories which are of comparable interest and importance to those by Jorge Luis Borges or Robert Coover, James Joyce or Katherine Mansfield, you would very often receive no reply. A look at recent research confirms the impression that either no outstanding British short stories have been published during the last two or three decades or that, if these works exist, they have so far not been...