SOURCE: “‘The Grave’ as Lyrical Short Story,” in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 1, No. 1, Fall, 1964, pp. 216–21.

In the following essay, Joselyn maintains that a reading of Porter's “The Grave” “will serve to illustrate several of the main characteristics of the ‘lyric’ short story.”

To those who enjoy the short story and are inclined to take it seriously as an art form, it is a constant source of surprise to find that although the genre has been with us for several centuries, there is still a marked dearth of systematic criticism concerning it. Thus, histories of the short story tend to be pedestrian, anthologies reprint and reprint the old chestnuts, and anything like a morphology of the genre is simply lacking. A few decades ago it was the fashion to classify short narratives as stories-of-plot, stories-of-action, stories-of-mood, and so on, perhaps by analogy with older, more mechanical views of...