Theorizing Flash Fiction

Theorizing Flash Fiction: Postmodern Perspectives aims to theorize the genre of flash fiction. A close theoretical analysis of the genre brings forth the supposition that for any genre to thrive and dominate, the literary fabric of times must become conducive to the form it harbingers.

Flash fiction, as a genre, thrives on multiplicity and plurality, and detests categorization. It, in a way, mirrors the age in which it comes to the fore. Postmodernism, with its celebration of the loss of fixed centers and power structures, can very evidently be seen reflected in the form. As it walks the tight rope of postmodernism, where Wittgenstein's 'anything goes' becomes the norm, it carves a niche for itself which is both conventional and revolutionary. This book reads the genre of flash fiction, engaging with the characteristic and theoretical underpinnings of postmodernism establishing it as a quintessential postmodern form that embodies the conjectural ideas of the age in its wake. It theorizes the form by engaging with ideas like authorship attribution, reader reception theory and reading process, postmodern narratology, and the poetics of sublime, reading the genre in synchronicity with the age.

By developing a theory for the form, this book aims to attest how flash fiction as a genre becomes a practical enunciation of the theoretical postulations of postmodernism.

Ruchi Nagpal is the recipient of a 2024–25 Harry Ransom Center Research Fellowship from The University of Texas at Austin. She is the co-editor of Premchand on Literature and Life (Routledge), as well as Panorama of the Pandemic: A Phenomenological Inquiry (Routledge). She has also translated more than two dozen nonfiction prose pieces in Premchand on Culture and Education (Routledge). She earned her doctoral degree from the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, and she has been a project fellow under the aegis of UGC SAP DRS, Jamia Millia Islamia.