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

by Robert Thacker

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781474231008
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	09/22/2016
Series:	Bloomsbury Studies in Contemporary North American Fiction
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	2 MB

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).
Robert Thacker is Charles A. Dana Professor of Canadian Studies and English Emeritus at St. Lawrence University, New York, USA. He has been working on 2013 Nobel Laureate Alice Munro since the mid-1970s and is now among the world's leading Munro critics. He is author of Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives: A Biography (2005; updated 2011), written with Munro's cooperation, and Reading Alice Munro, 1973-2013 (2016; open access). He edited The Rest of the Story: Critical Essays on Alice Munro (1999) and Alice Munro: Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage; Runaway; Dear Life (2016) in Bloomsbury's Studies in Contemporary North American Fiction series.

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

Editorial Reviews

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.” – Canadian Literature

From the Publisher