Part 2: short story as a genre

Origin

The origin of the short story can be traced back to the oral story-telling tradition. Perhaps, the oldest form of short story is the anecdote which was popular in the Roman Empire. At the time, the anecdote functioned as a kind of parables in the Roman Empire.
By the early 14th century, the story-telling tradition began to evolve into written stories. One of the important literary productions in that era was Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron. Significantly, both of these books constitute of individual short stories ranging from farce, humorous anecdotes to well-crafted fictions.

Modern short story

Early short stories include works such as Brothers Grimm's Fairy Tales (1824-26) and Nikolai Gogol's Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka (1831-32), Washington Irving's Rip van Winkle (1819), The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820), Edgar Allan Poe's Tales of the Grotesque, Arabesque (1840) and Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales (1842).
The phenomenal growth of newspapers and journals in the latter part of the 19th century created a heavy demand for short fiction in the range of 15,000 to 30,000 words. Some of the famous short stories of this era include Boleslaw Purus's A Legend of Old Egypt (1888) and Anton Chekhov's Ward No. 6 (1892).
This era in the evolution of the short story was marked by the growth of literary theories regarding the short story. Among the noteworthy theoretical discourses were presented in Edgar Allan Poe's The Philosophy of Composition (1846). In 1884, Brander Matthews, the first American professor of dramatic literature, published The Philosophy of the Short-Story.
It was Mathews who a year later, named the new literary genre "Short Story". High-profile magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker Scribner's and The Saturday Evening Post published short stories in each issue in the early 20th century.
"The short-story is the single effect, complete and self-contained, while the novel is of necessity broken into a series of episodes. Thus the short-story has, what the novel cannot have, the effect of "totality," as Poe called it, the unity of impression. Of a truth, the short-story is not a chapter out of a novel, or an incident or an episode extracted from a longer tale, but at its best impresses the reader with the belief that it would be spoiled if it were made larger, or if it were incorporated into a more elaborate work. ... In fact, it may be said that no one has ever succeeded as a writer of Short- stories who had not ingenuity, originality, and compression ; and that most of those who have succeeded in this line had also the touch of fantasy" - The Philosophy of Short Story.

Ack: http://www.sundayobserver.lk/2011/04/10/mon03.asp

A rap to warm your heart:) and deliver the lesson too:)
http://blog.flocabulary.com/five-elements-of-a-story-lesson/     Check the video link