This achievement has also been overshadowed by the local development of the novel and by the tendency to see the short story as an inferior form. Yet there is a line of distinguished short story writers extending from the 1890s to the present.

On the other hand, the fact that the Australian short story could be overshadowed by overseas developments may explain why it has been critically undervalued, at home as well as abroad notable exceptions are its supposed progenitor and folk figure, Henry Lawson, who is little known outside Australia, and Nobel prize winner Patrick White. In the 1980s the short story is generally seen as a thriving literary form, for readers and writers alike. The European and also the American influence help to explain why the short story form has proved adaptable in Australia, flourishing here in a new culture since the 1890s, when writers achieved a breakthrough in representing experiences which differed from those of the parent society. Its practitioners are still tentative, watching one another …³

In 1936, Elizabeth Bowen said: The short story is a young art: as we know it, it is the child of this century … An art having behind it little tradition is at once impetuous and halting, and is affectable. ¹ Nadine Gordimer and others found this comparatively new form more adaptable to the modem world: Why is it that while the death of the novel is good for post mortem at least once a year, the short story lives on unmolested? … and, like a child suffering from healthy neglect, it survives.² The short story has outstripped attempts either to define it satisfactorily or to come to terms with it critically. In the twentieth century, the short story proved itself more flexible and more open to experiment than the novel.

The yield by tara june winch analysis