SOURCE: Sachs, Murray. Introduction to The French Short Story in the Nineteenth Century: A Critical Anthology, edited by Murray Sachs, pp. 3-13. New York: Oxford University Press, 1969.

In the following excerpt, Sachs considers the crystallization of the modern short story in French literature around 1830.

As a literary art form, the short story emerged even later among the Western literatures than did its late-blooming next-to-kin, the novel. We generally think of the modern novel as an eighteenth-century development, mainly in France and England. But the modern short story did not crystallize into a recognizable genre until a full century later, with the work of Nodier, Mérimée, and the first generation of Romantics in France, and with the work of Hawthorne and Poe in the United States.

This late emergence of the short story form is a rather startling fact of literary history, when one stops to think...