Alice Munro: 'Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage', 'Runaway', 'Dear Life'(Bloomsbury Studies in Contemporary North American Fiction)

The awarding 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.

Table of Contents:
Series Editor's Introduction Acknowledgements Introduction: Robert Thacker, 'Durable and Freestanding: The Late Art of Munro' Part I Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage 1 Charles E. May “The Key to the Treasure”: Sex and Storytelling in Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, 2 Tracy Ware, 'Teaching Conflict in Munro from “The Day of the Butterfly” to “Comfort”' 3 Robert McGill, 'Mistaken Identities in “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”' Part II Runaway 4 Julie Rivkin, 'Sibyl at the Kitchen Table, or Translating the Classics in “Hateship” and The Juliet Triptych' 5 Eric Reeves, 'The Lives of Women and Men: Narrative Inflection in Runaway' 6 Lester Barber, “Old Confusions or Obligations”: Comic Vision in Runaway' Part III Dear Life 7 J. R. (Tim) Struthers, 'Traveling with Munro: Reading “To Reach Japan”' 8 Ailsa Cox, '“Rage and Admiration”: Grotesque Humor in Dear Life' 9 Linda M. Morra, '“It Was[n't] All Inward”: The Dynamics of Intimacy in the “Finale” of Dear Life' Notes on Chapters Works Cited Further Reading Notes on Contributors Index

About the Author :
Robert Thacker is Charles A. Dana Professor of Canadian Studies and English at St. Lawrence University, New York, USA. His many previous publications include Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives - A Biography (2005, revised 2011).

Review :
Thacker's collection of essays on the work of Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro will be useful not only to students of Munro's work but also to creative writing students who want to crawl around in the rafters of story making to understand how the architect drew the plans, and to know the builder who constructed them. Munro's stories are inhabitable constructions, pieces of life recognizable as something that could so easily have been one's own. The story pulls the reader in, and on looking back one sees the deeper cord of meaning that was lying beneath the surface. Munro's stories seem so simple, like a story anyone could tell, but they are well built, as this collection reveals. One finds in Munro's stories moral debts that must be paid. The essays in this collection offer ways to get into the stories, collect the things one came for, and get out surprised by the unknowable truths now lying in plain sight. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers. A welcome opportunity to think about the concept of “late style” in relation to Munro … The complexities of volumes like Runaway, Dear Life, Too Much Happiness, and Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage offer opportunities aplenty for a close examination of a literary sensibility that prizes complexity over superficiality, inconclusiveness over pat conclusions. This accessible book is a welcome treasure for readers and students of Munro's fiction; its erudition ensures that it will be eagerly sought out by scholars working in the field.