For a recent review in The Times Literary Supplement, Ian Ellison discusses Civic Storytelling: The Rise of Short Forms and the Agency of Literature by Florian Fuchs. Click here to learn more about the book. Click here to read the full review. An excerpt appears below:

“Florian Fuchs’s Civic Storytelling: The Rise of Short Forms and the Agency of Literature looks beyond the novel as the paradigmatic literary form of the modern age. From the seventeenth century onwards, the author argues, the classical technique of ars topica (topical argumentation), which structured concise arguments for resolving quotidian and intellectual problems, was no longer practised by writers and thinkers. In its wake came the rhetorical flourishes of more recognizably literary forms. Accordingly, Fuchs claims, short narrative forms became symptomatic of literature’s role in life and society at the turn of the nineteenth century: storytelling, in short (pun intended), emerged as a modern form of civic agency.”