Special Delivery : A Flash Fiction Collection
- Submitting institution
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University of Portsmouth
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 25066387
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
-
-
- Publisher
- Gumbo Press
- ISBN
- 9781724024657
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- December
- Year of publication
- 2018
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
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-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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C - Creative Writing
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This book is a collection of flash fictions written over an extended period of a creative investigation into this still relatively new form of fiction. The investigation approached various genres and subgenres of fiction – both individually and in combination – to understand to what extent they might work within the form. This book collects together some of the more interesting and successful results of the investigation to produce a varied cross-section of the possibilities within the form. It demonstrates that while realism and magic realism are highly suited to flash fiction, speculative fiction is indeed possible and can in fact reap great rewards as this volume shows.
Reader Response Theory and Derrida’s concept of supplément structured the investigation in the production of these stories. This has formed the basis for theoretical presentations at conferences (in particular at the annual Great Writing Conference) where initially the stories, and latterly the book itself as an artefact, were used to examine the creative process in the writing of fiction.
The book was self-published in 2018, and has been promoted both commercially, at conferences, and as a basis for pedagogy around flash fiction specifically and – as the shorter form can be used to act as a magnifying lens into narrative – into the wider world of fiction more generally. The work has featured in events relating to the annual National Flash Fiction Day, of which Calum Kerr was the founder; and public readings such as in the Winchester School of Art (2015). Numerous stories have been disseminated elsewhere, including in Flash: The International Short - short Story Magazine (‘For What’, 2016); A Box of Stars Beneath the Bed, National Flash-Fiction Day 2016 (‘Special delivery’, 2016) and Paragraph Planet (‘Video Nasties’, 2014).
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -