SOURCE: “Contrastive Structures in John Metcalf's Artist Stories,” in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 29, No. 3, Spring, 1988, pp. 163–78.

In the following essay, Nischick analyzes the relationship between the artist and society in several of Metcalf's short stories, and discusses the role of contrast in his work.

With the possible exception of Robert Weaver, no one but John Metcalf has devoted as much time, encouragement and criticism to the Canadian short story in the last fifteen years or so. No one else has edited as many anthologies of short fiction in Canada (altogether some twenty text and trade books), making the Canadian short story available to the general reader and to schools and universities. Thus one of Metcalf's earliest anthologies, Sixteen by Twelve, which appeared in 1970,¹ constituted the first anthology of contemporary Canadian stories also directed at schools. Some ten years later, Metcalf's anthology Making It New: Contemporary Canadian...