Reading Alice Munro’s Breakthrough Books
A Suite in Four Voices
J.R. (Tim) Struthers, Ailsa Cox, Corinne Bigot, Catherine Sheldrick Ross
- Provides an authoritative assessment of the all-important middle period in the career of the widely read Nobel Prize winning short story writer Alice Munro, a canonical figure in contemporary literature
- Provides in-depth analysis of Munro's four successive breakthrough collections beginning with her sixth title The Progress of Love (1986) through Friend of My Youth (1990) and Open Secrets (1994) to The Love of a Good Woman (1998), thereby addressing a major gap in Munro criticism and, by extension, in all short story criticism
- Examines a range of literary and cultural elements that inform each volume, paying careful attention to form, technique and style in particular stories as well as discussing how individual stories talk to one another within a collection
- Brings together the different yet fully complementary perspectives of four long-engaged readers of Munro – two from Canada and two from Europe – who create a wholly unique and highly engaging conversation in four voices about what reading Munro means in the 21st century
- Offers a finely orchestrated, exciting new model for how criticism can be collectively written
What in terms of Alice Munro’s creative artistry and creative power allowed her to become the first and only short story writer, the first and only Canadian, and just the thirteenth woman in history to win the Nobel Prize in Literature? And exactly when during Munro’s career did her artistry and power advance to ensure that she would earn such world-wide renown? The answers lie in studying the boldly innovative yet greatly under-examined group of her four mid-career breakthrough books. Our volume therefore provides a carefully orchestrated analysis of Munro’s subtle yet potent handling of form, technique and style both within individual stories and across these special collections. Reading Alice Munro’s Breakthrough Books: A Suite in Four Voices not only addresses a significant vacancy in Munro criticism – and, by extension, in all short story criticism – but, equally importantly, offers an exciting new model for how criticism can be collectively written.
Introduction: Catch and Release – Alice Munro and ‘the human palimpsest’, Robert Thacker
Seeing in Circles: The Fierce Originality of The Progress of Love (1986), J.R. (Tim) Struthers
1. Welcome to My House!
2. Epic Inclusiveness in ‘The Progress of Love’
3. Verbal Play in ‘Lichen’
4. Ways of Knowing and Ways of Being in ‘Monsieur les Deux Chapeaux’
5. Did You Enjoy Your Visit?
‘The Old Order Changeth’: Change, Renovation and Modernity in Friend of My Youth (1990), Ailsa Cox
1. Looking Through Binoculars: The Short Story Genre and Moments of Change
2. Textual Instability in ‘Differently’
3. Approaching the First Three Stories
4. The Coda: ‘Wigtime’
5. Reading Across a Short Story Collection
The Art of Misreading
or, The Driving Force of Misunderstanding: Open Secrets (1994), Corinne Bigot
1. Introducing a Dark Collection
2. ‘Open Secrets’: Death by Landscape
3. Approaching the First Three Stories
4. ‘Vandals’ as Coda: On (Not) Reading Signs
5. The Art of Misreading
Rereading The Love of a Good Woman (1998), Catherine Sheldrick Ross
1. Introduction: ‘An Extra Dimension to Life’
2. ‘The Love of a Good Woman’: ‘The Book Had Just Shifted This Much’
3. ‘Jakarta’: ‘A Place of Their Own’
4. ‘Cortes Island’: Sources and Transformations
5. What Ordinary Readers Say about Reading The Love of a Good Woman
Works Consulted
Index
Contributor Biographies
Acknowledgements
This book is a breakthrough in Munro critical scholarship. A collaboratively authored project by four Munro specialists, for the first time it foregrounds the Nobel Prize winner's four mid-career short story collections and her innovative reshaping of the genre. A revelatory reading of the multilayered narrative complexity which is Munro's distinctive signature.
The pleasure in these essays is that they are less essays than passionate engagements with Munro's words, sentences and punctuation. They do not ask of the stories What but, rather, How. Each essay on what is terra incognita leaves us gazing out, silent, as it were, upon a peak in Darien. These are by far the best illuminations of Munro’s work yet written.
Alice Munro is largely responsible for rescuing the short story from being overshadowed by the novel. The four critics here demonstrate how Munro moved from telling stories to creating complex explorations of reality as multilayers of memory and perspective.
