The Elements of the Short Story Author:Edward Everett Hale Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: EXERCISE III IRVING AS A STORY WRITER Object: To observe the chief qualities of Irving as seen in his stories, and his relation to story writing. Mater... more »ial: Other stories by Irving; Life and Letters, as in Ex. I; the results of Exercises I and II. The chief collections of stories by Irving are: The Sketch Book, Tales of a Traveller, Bracebridge Hall, and The Alhambra; although the last is not very useful for our purpose, for its tales are usually made on the model of The Arabian Nights, or other such literature. The most useful of the stories are the following: in the Sketch Book, "The Widow and her Son," "The Specter Bridegroom," "The Pride of the Village," and "Rural Life in England"; in Brace- bridge Hall, "The Stout Gentleman," "Dolph Heyliger," "The Student of Salamanca," "The Wedding," and "The English Country Gentleman"; in Tales of a Traveller, "The German Student," "The Young Italian," "The Devil and Tom Walker," and " Wolfert Webber." Directions: For dealing with any one of several stories, the directions must of necessity be less specific than in Exercises I and II.1 1 It is advisable to make as wide a reading as possible and it is generally good, and often necessary, to assign the same story to several students, not for joint work, but in order to compare independent im- In "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "Rip Van Winkle," we have seen Irving at his best: these are the most widely known of his stories, and we shall be safe in following the results of their study; namely, tha/Irving was most particularly an essayist who threw h1s ideas on character and setting into the form of stories The student should read several of the above-named stories, neglecting for the moment their character as stories —unless it might seem that action is the chief...« less