The Rise of the Contemporary Novella

The novella has emerged as a premier global form of contemporary literature. The subject of popular writing workshops and major reprint series by both trade and experimental publishing houses, it caters to a desire for novelness in a moment of compressed time for writers and readers alike. But what is it about the form that drives our love of it? How does the relationship between time and technology structure its compelling status as well as the narratives of its history chosen to contextualize it? My examples, from the crucial subgenre of the SF novella as well as its experimental counterparts, will suggest that the mechanics of narrative length and ambition have been mobilized by contemporary writers and readers alike through the novella to reflexively recast relationships between fiction, media, and genre.


Kate Marshall is associate professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, where she also serves on the faculty of the history and philosophy of science. She is the author of Corridor: Media Architectures in American Fiction (2013), and articles on technology, media, and narrative. She is co-editor of the Post45 book series at Stanford University Press and is on the collective’s editorial board. She has just completed a study of the desire for nonhuman narration in contemporary literature and theory that traces its history in the old, weird American fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her current project is a minor theory of the novella, especially as it frames conceptions of completeness in contemporary culture