The 17th and 18th centuries mark the temporary decline of short fiction in the West. The causes of this phenomenon are many: the emergence of the novel; the failure of the Boccaccio tradition to produce in three centuries much more than variations or imitations of older, well-worn material; and a renaissant fascination with drama and poetry, the superior forms of classical antiquity. Another cause for the disappearance of major works of short fiction is suggested by the growing preference for journalistic sketches. The increasing awareness of other lands and the growing interest in social conditions (accommodated by a publication boom) produced a plethora of descriptive and biographical sketches. Although these journalistic elements later were incorporated in the fictional short story, for the time being fact held sway over the imagination. Travel books, criminal biographies, social description, sermons, and essays occupied the market. Only occasionally did a serious story find its way into print, and then it was usually a production of an established writer like Voltaire or Joseph Addison.
The modern short story emerged almost simultaneously in Germany, the United States, France, and Russia. In the United States, the short story, as in Germany, evolved in two strains. On the one hand there appeared the realistic story that sought objectively to deal with seemingly real places, events, or persons. The regionalist stories of the second half of the 19th century (including those by George W. Cable, Bret Harte, Sarah Orne Jewett) are of this kind. On the other hand, there developed the impressionist story, a tale shaped and given meaning by the consciousness and psychological attitudes of the narrator. Predicated upon this element of subjectivity, these stories seem less objective and are less realistic in the outward sense. Of this sort are Poe's tales in which the hallucinations of a central character or narrator provide the details and facts of the story. Like the narrators in “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843) and “The Imp of the Perverse” (1845), the narrator of “The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839) so distorts and transforms what he sees that the reader cannot hope to look objectively at the scene. Looking through an intermediary's eyes, the reader can see only the narrator's impressions of the scene.