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New Short Story Theories (1994)-both critical anthologies reprinting a lot of older material-discussion of the short story as a genre has withered. 1 In fact, short story theory was not so much at a crossroads as in a cul-de-sac. The reason may well lie in the close association of study of the short story with questions that draw on kinds of formalism-such as what a short story is, the issue of whether it differs in kind or mere length from other forms of prose fiction, and so on. In other words, short story theory itself may have seemed almost a non-starter within a critical culture that tended to associate any suggestion of'formalism'with moral or political evasion. But this approach foreclosed too much. In an essay published nine years after Short Story Theory at a Crossroads Lohafer wrote persuasively of the dangers that beset the reading of a short story in the context of 1990s criticism. A story such as Katherine Mansfield's' Ma …