SOURCE: “Novellas,” in John Metcalf, Twayne Publishers, 1986, pp. 71–101.

In the following essay, Cameron offers a thematic and stylistic overview of Metcalf's novellas.

Genre may be thought of as a set of norms, a set of expectations that structure our reading of texts, allowing us to organize our experience and understanding of the text according to conventional patterns and to recognize variations in the use of conventions. But for Metcalf, the novella is not really a form of discourse or genre radically distinct from the short story, for the impulse of both is poetic. The imagistic, metonymic patterns, the texture, and the plot are not inherently more complex than they would be in a short story but merely extended or amplified, making the narrative weightier and giving it a certain magnitude. Short stories compress, novels expand, but novellas do both. Novellas allow for both intensity and expansion through a...