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A Comparative History of the Literary Draft in Europe
Edited by Olga Beloborodova and Dirk Van Hulle
[Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages XXXV] 2024
► pp. 320–333

1.4.4
Kleine Prosa

The poetics of the draft in prose sketches, prose poems, flash fiction and related small forms

This chapter explores the poetics of the draft in the transgeneric field of modern small prose forms from the aphoristic “fragments” of the Romantic period, through the prose sketches and prose poems of the nineteenth century, to microfiction (flash fiction), emblematic short prose, literary notes (Aufzeichnungen) and digital formats in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The German notion of Kleine Prosa, which moves beyond the narrow focus on narrative forms in the English term “short prose”, provides the conceptual framework. The chapter foregrounds German literature but also considers other European-language literatures in comparative perspective. The point of departure is the overlap between the poetics of these modernist short forms – which undercut established genre patterns, experiment with innovative modes of writing and invite reader participation in the construction of meaning – and the history of the draft, note-taking, rewriting in modern literary practice since the eighteenth century.
Keywords: small forms, fragment, aphorism, essay, prose sketch, prose poem, microfiction, emblem, genre theory, literary modernism
Article outline
  • Conceptualising Kleine Prosa
  • The poetics of the draft in small prose forms – a tour d’horizon
  • Note
  • References
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References (39)
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