Our Very Own Adventure - Towards a Poetics of the Short Story

Our Very Own Adventure demonstrates the main convention of the short story; specifically the heightened reader response that Carolyne Lee terms 'narratorial presence'. The intensity of the short story encourages readers to appropriate the fictive world, as rendered through one or more represented subjectivities in the narrative. Lee argues that this narratorial presence is the enabling effect of the tale's telling. Each chapter examines a group of stories (by authors such as William Faulkner, James Joyce, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ray Bradbury and Alice Munro) that share basic similarities, but where the narratorial presence differs due to differing techniques. Our Very Own Adventure reveals just how a story yields its meanings to a reader.