Introduction
Part One: Life, Literature, and Knowledge: Theoretical Premises
1. Literature, Life Knowledge, and 'Science for Living'
2. The Knowledge of Literature: Positions, Debates, and Approaches
Part Two: The Genericity of Literary Life Knowledge in the Short Story
4. The Short Story as an Organon of Life Knowledge: An Epistemological Approach to the Genre
5. Life Knowledge as Projection: The Cognitive Work of Short Stories
6. Life-Changing Experiences and Turning Points: The Crisis-Ridden Life Knowledge of the Short Story
7. The American Short Story and the Temporalization of Life in Modernity: Washington Irving's "Rip Van Winkle" and F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"
Part Three: Stages of Life
Staging Life in the Short Story
8. Epistemological Uncertainty and Knowledge of Maturation in Stories of Initiation: Sherwood Anderson's "I Want to Know Why", Eudora Welty's "A Visit of Charity" and "A Memory", and Junot Díaz's "Ysrael"
9. Midlife Crisis as Turning Point for the 'Mature Moderns': John Cheever's "The Country Husband"
10. Stories of 'Unlived' and Secret Lives: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sherwood Anderson, Henry James, and James Thurber
11. Gerontophobia, Ageism, and the Wisdom of Later Life in Stories of Aging: Willa Cather's "Old Mrs. Harris" and Eudora Welty's "Old Mr. Marblehall"
12. Understanding Life Retrospectively in Stories of Remembered Life: Willa Cather, William Saroyan, Russell Banks, Anthony Doerr
Coda: The Short Story as Epistemological Fiction Alice Munro's "What Do You Want to Know For?"