Reading Alice Munro, 1973-2013

Robert Thacker

• Publisher: University of Calgary Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781552388396
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781552388426
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

In Reading Alice Munro, 1973-2013, the world's leading Munro scholar offers a critical overview of Alice Munro and her writing spanning forty years. Beginning with a newly written overarching introduction, featuring directive interleaved commentaries addressing chronology and contexts, ending with encompassing afterword, this collection provides a selection of essays and reviews that reflect their times and tell the story of Munro's emergence and recognition as an internationally acclaimed writer since the 1970s. Acknowledging her beginnings and her persistence as a writer of increasingly exceptional short stories, and just short stories, it treats her career through Thacker's criticism up to her fourteenth collection, Dear Life (2012), and to the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature. Altogether, this book encompasses the whole trajectory of Munro's critical presence while offering a singularly informed retrospective perspective.

Index

Page numbers refer to the printed edition - use your e-reader's search function to locate entries in the e-book.

A

“A. E. Housman” (Auden), 7

Acocella, Joan, 12

Agee, James, 143

Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 10, 16, 21, 228, 244, 262

Alice Munro (Blodgett), 17, 21, 93, 96, 103–9, 168, 248

Alice Munro (Cox), 255

Alice Munro (Howells), 249

Alice Munro (Pfaus), 247

Alice Munro: An Annotated Bibliography of Works and Criticism (Mazur and Moulder), 17, 244

“Alice Munro—The Art of the Short Story,” 254

Alice Munro: A Double Life (Ross), 184

Alice Munro: Paradox and Parallel (Martin), 22, 92, 248

Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives (Thacker), 4, 8, 10, 19, 112–13, 198, 232, 244, 246, 263, 282n1

“Alice Munro and the American South” (Struthers), 67, 134, 272n4, 280n17

“Alice Munro and Critics: A Paradigm” (Thacker), 3, 274n2

“Alice Munro and the White American South” (Robson), 67

“Alice Munro’s Fictive Imagination” (Struthers), 69, 84, 96

Alice Munro’s Narrative Art (Duncan), 10, 199

Alice Munro Papers: First Accession, 280n8

Alice Munro Papers: Second Accession, 280n14

Allen Lane, 16

“Among School Children” (Yeats), 90, 276n14

Anderson, Sherwood, 143, 192

The Annotated Bibliography of Canada’s Major Authors (Thacker), 17, 247, 274n3

Antigonish Review, 251

The Anxiety of Influence (Bloom), 135

April Twilights (1903) (Cather), 278n9

“Araby” (Joyce), 40

Arnold, Marilyn, 277n1

The Art of Alice Munro: Saying the Unsayable (Miller), 17, 65–71, 247, 249, 251, 273n2, 274n3

Association for Canadian Studies in the United States (ACSUS), 3

Atwood, Margaret, 3, 4, 65, 68, 96, 201–2, 241–42

Aubrey, Kim, 252

Auden, W. H., 7, 8–9

Away From Her (Polley), 254

B

“The Baby or the Violin” (Morgenstern), 283n3

Bailey, Nancy I., 246

Barber, Virginia, 3, 26, 151, 233, 235, 244, 253

Basso, Susanna, 255

“Becoming Noncanonical: The Case Against Willa Cather” (O’Brien), 122

“Before Breakfast” (Cather), 115–18, 123, 129, 130–31, 142

Bennett, Donna, 244

Beran, Carol, 148, 151

Besner, Neil, 176, 184–85, 248, 282n6

A Bird in the House (Laurence), 97

Blodgett, E. D., 17, 22, 92, 93, 96, 101, 103–9, 116, 134, 138, 168, 169, 244, 246, 248, 276n12, 276n19, 279n2, 279n3, 281n3

Bloom, Harold, 135–36, 255–56

“Bloom’s Modern Critical Views,” 256

“The Body as Audience in the Writings of Alice Munro” (Kamboureli), 276n11

Books & Company, 261

British Columbia, 2, 3, 9, 14, 80–81, 148, 193, 195, 208, 220, 226

Brönte, Charlotte, 253

Brooks, Cleanth, and Robert Penn Warren, 40

Brown, Marion Marsh, and Ruth Crone, 277n7

Brown, Russell Morton, 254–55

Browning, Robert, 134

Bucholt, Maggie, 252

Buss, Helen M., 151

Byatt, A. S., 12, 202

C

“Canada’s Successful Writers Must Count on Blessings from the U. S. First” (Metcalf), 252

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), 245

Canadian Forum, 278n9

Canadian Literature, 246

The Canadian Postmodern (Hutcheon), 93–94, 98–100

The Canadian Short Story (Gadpaille), 93–94, 96, 276n9

Canadian Writers and Their Works (Dahlie), 66

Canitz, A. E. Christa, 170, 282n6

Carrington, Ildikó de Papp, 17, 22, 94, 96, 101–9, 116, 134, 151, 169, 244, 248, 250, 276n12, 276n13, 276n14, 277n6, 279n2, 279n3, 279n6, 281n2, 281n3

Carscallen, James, 69–71, 160, 170, 171, 172, 177–81, 183, 190, 282n6

“The Cather Connection in Alice Munro’s ‘Dulse’” (Stich), 276n12

Cather, Willa, 6, 10–13, 90, 106, 113, 115–31, 134, 138–42, 169, 177, 202, 212, 227, 261, 274n3, 276n12, 280n15, 280n1

Charman, Caitlin J., 257

Cheever, John, 143

Chekhov, Anton, 134, 210, 225, 230, 256

Clinton,...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Alice Munro’s “Approach and Recognition”
• Narrative Techniques, Forms, and Critical Issues: Establishing a Presence
• “Clear Jelly”: Alice Munro’s Narrative Dialectics (1983)
• Connection: Alice Munro and Ontario (1984)
• Critical Interlude: Conferring Munro (1987)
• Munro’s Progress (1987)Alice Munro, The Progress of Love. McClelland & Stewart, 1986.
• “So Shocking a Verdict in Real Life”: Autobiography in Alice Munro’s Stories (1988)
• Critical Interlude: Go Ask Alice: The Progress of Munro Criticism (1991)
• What the Archives Reveal: Reading a Deepening Aesthetic
• Alice Munro’s Willa Cather (1992)
• Alice Munro and the Anxiety of American Influence (1994)
• Alice Munro, Writing “Home”: “Seeing This Trickle in Time” (1998)
• Critical Interlude: What’s “Material”: The Progress of Munro Criticism, Part 2 (1998)
• Mapping Munro: Reading the “Clues” (1999)
• Understanding the Oeuvre
• Alice Munro’s Ontario (2007)
• A “Booming Tender Sadness”: Alice Munro’s Irish (2008)
• No Problem Here: A Review of Too Much Happiness (2009
• “The Way the Skin of the Moment Can Break Open”: Reading Alice Munro’s “White Dump” (2010)
• Critical Interlude:Alice Munro: Critical Reception (2013)
• Afterword: “A Wonderful Stroke of Good Fortune for Me”: Reading Alice Munro, 1973–2013
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index