Approaches, Definitions and Literary Forebears: The Novellas of Claire Keegan

• Zsuzsa Csikai

The definition and generic description of the novella as a distinct prose subgenre has proved elusive. In any attempt to define the novella, the question is what it does differ-ently to the short story and the novel, and whether the novella has distinguishing characteristics regarding form and content that the other two genres do not exhibit. Judith Leibowitz claims that the distinguishing feature of the novella is its “double effect of intensity and expansion”. Exploring the ways in which the novella is a distinct and independent genre is an intriguing challenge, and in this essay, I examine whether Leibowitz’s ideas provide a working theory for making such a distinction. For this aim, Claire Keegan’s novellas will be examined alongside a novella by Anton Chekhov. A special focus will be on Keegan’s Foster, which first appeared in an abridged version as a short story in The New Yorker (2010) and later that year was published as a self-standing book in its original form as a novella. The formal and structural analysis of these short prose works will show whether Leibowitz’s theory can yield a better understanding of the novella as not an adjacent but an independent prose subgenre.