The Theory Behind the Single Sitting

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Edgar Allan Poe is better known on this atlas for Gothic horror and for inventing the detective story than for literary theory, but his 1846 essay The Philosophy of Composition did something few writers attempt: it set out, in his own words, the design principle behind a form that had never had one written down. Poe argued that a short prose narrative should be built entirely toward a single, unified effect, every incident, every sentence chosen because it serves that one effect rather than because the plot happens to require it, and that the whole should be readable in one sitting so that no outside interruption could break the effect before it lands. The claim reached beyond his own fiction; it became, and has stayed, one of the most frequently cited critical statements about what a short story is for, distinguishing it from the novel not simply by length but by design. Poe's own stories, from the detective puzzle of The Murders in the Rue Morgue to his Gothic tales, are commonly read as demonstrations of the same principle his criticism named.