Alice Munro: Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, Runaway, Dear Life

Description

The award of the Nobel Prize in Literature to the Canadian writer Alice Munro in 2013 confirmed her position as a master of the short story form. This book explores Munro’s work from a full range of critical perspectives, focussing on three of her most popular and important published collections: Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001), Runaway (2004), and her final collection Dear Life (2012). With chapters written by the world’s leading critics of Munro’s work, the short story form and contemporary Canadian writing, this book explores such themes as love and marriage, sex, fate, gender, and humor in her writings as well as her approaches to narrative form and autobiography. In these three late collections Munro sharply articulates, again and again, the mysteries of being itself. Title Page Copyright Page Contents Series Editor’s Introduction Acknowledgments Introduction: “Durable and Freestanding”: The Late Art of Munro Alice Munro over Ontario A deepening geological sensibility: “Axis” Part 1 Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage Chapter 1 “The Key to the Treasure” Sex and Storytelling in Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage” “Floating Bridge” “Nettles” “Post and Beam” “What is Remembered” Chapter 2 Teaching and Conflict in Munro from “The Day of the Butterfly” to “Comfort” Classroom antics Surviving the boss of the classroom An ambivalent conclusion Chapter 3 Mistaken Identities in “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” Marriage and mischaracterization The problem of names Flowery expressions and fine distinctions Part 2 Runaway Chapter 4 Sibyl at the Kitchen Table, or Translating the Classics in “Hateship” and the Juliet Triptych Chapter 5 The Lives of Women and Men: Narrative Inflection in Alice Munro’s Runaway Narrative inflection: Readers, characters, and the control of indeterminacy Complex inflections The Juliet Triptych Munro and the narrative tradition Life, fate, and closure Chapter 6 “Old Confusions or Obligations”: Comic Vision in Runaway “Tricks” “Passion” The Juliet Triptych “Runaway” “Powers” Part 3 Dear Life Chapter 7 Traveling with Munro: Reading “To Reach Japan” For my mother, Jean Laurie Bowley, October 6, 1919–July 4, 2007, on my sixty-fifth birthday, Saturday July 25, 2015 Story as autobiography Story as metafiction Story as metaphor Story as allegory Coda Chapter 8 “Rage and Admiration”: Grotesque Humor in Dear Life “Pride” “Corrie” “Dolly” Chapter 9 “It Was[n’t] All Inward”: The Dynamics of Intimacy in the “Finale” of Dear Life Notes Introduction Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Works Cited Primary sources Archival sources Interviews with Munro Secondary sources Further Reading Notes on Contributors Volume Editor Contributors Index