Alice Munro's Late Style

'Writing is the Final Thing'

Robert Thacker

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781350270381
• eBook ISBN: 9781350270404
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Focusing on Alice Munro's last three collections, this book examines the differences between these volumes and the rest of her work to analyse the emergence and the difference of her 'late style'.
Alice Munro has effectively reshaped the short story as a form. This book focuses on Munro's art of recursion - an approach that has been evident throughout her career but came to the fore in her last three books, The View from Castle Rock (2006), Too Much Happiness (2009) and, especially, Dear Life (2012). This recursion and return manifest themselves not only in Munro's return to previously published pieces, but also to her discovery and meditations on her Scottish heritage, which can be read as entrance to her own understanding of herself and her life. Its provenance, displayed through archival evidence, is complex yet reveals a writer intent on a precise late style.
Munro's final works serve as a coda to both her late style and to her entire career as arguably one of the finest short story writers ever to put pen to paper.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface: “I Want to Do This with Honour, If I Possibly Can”
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Of Late Styles and Alice Munro
• 1 “Maybe I Can Do Something Unexpected with It”: Imagining The View from Castle Rock
• 2 “It Is Difficult to Decide What Works in a Book of This Sort”: The Making of The View from Castle Rock
• 3 “It Has Some Real Munrovian Highlights”: “The View from Castle Rock” and The View from Castle Rock
• 4 “And Then Another Little Story Comes along and That Solves How Life Has Got to Be”: The Recursions of Too Much Happiness
• 5 “It Seemed as If We Had Gotten Time Back, as If There Was All the Time in the World”: The Gathering of Stories before the “Finale” in Dear Life
• 6 “Simple Truth”: “Too Much Happiness” and the “Finale” to Dear Life
• Epilogue: “To Have Got My Chance to Do It, as well as I Could”: Alice Munro Finis
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• Imprint