Reading Alice Munro’s Breakthrough Books

J.R. (Tim) Struthers taught full-time at the University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario, Canada, from 1985 until 2022. He has edited some thirty volumes of theory, criticism, autobiography, short stories and poetry, including the companion volumes Alice Munro Country and Alice Munro Everlasting (2020). Ailsa Cox is Emerita Professor of Short Fiction at Edge Hill University, UK. She is the author of Writing Short Stories (2005; 2nd ed., 2016) and Alice Munro (2004). Her own short fiction has appeared in journals including Katherine Mansfield Studies (2010, 2022). Corinne Bigot is Maîtresse de Conférences of Postcolonial Literatures at Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès, France. She is the author of Alice Munro, les silences de la nouvelle (2014) and, with Catherine Lanone, Sunlight and Shadow, Past and Present: Alice Munro’s Dance of the Happy Shades (2014). Catherine Sheldrick Ross was until her death Professor Emerita in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at Western University in London, Ontario, Canada. Her previous work included The Pleasures of Reading: A Booklover’s Alphabet (2014) and Alice Munro: A Double Life (1992).

The four co-authors of Reading Alice Munro’s Breakthrough Books: A Suite in Four Voices [...] have all been reading Munro for several decades and keep coming back to her short fiction, finding more to it with each re-reading. As a quartet, the image of the musical suite in the subtitle points at a combination of diversity and complementariness among them, in a composition meant to reveal and educate.

• Introduction: Catch and Release – Alice Munro and ‘the human palimpsest’, Robert ThackerSeeing in Circles: The Fierce Originality of The Pro​gress of Love (1986), J.R. (Tim) Struthers1. Welcome to My House!2. Epic Inclusiveness in ‘The Progress of Love’3. Verbal Play in ‘Lichen’4. Ways of Knowing and Ways of Being in ‘Monsieur les Deux Chapeaux’5. Did You Enjoy Your Visit?‘The Old Order Changeth’: Change, Renovation and Modernity in Friend of My Youth (1990), Ailsa Cox1. Looking Through Binoculars: The Short Story Genre and Moments of Change2. Textual Instability in ‘Differently’3. Approaching the First Three Stories4. The Coda: ‘Wigtime’5. Reading Across a Short Story CollectionThe Art of Misreading; or, The Driving Force of Misunderstanding: Open Secrets (1994), Corinne Bigot1. Introducing a Dark Collection2. ‘Open Secrets’: Death by Landscape3. Approaching the First Three Stories4. ‘Vandals’ as Coda: On (Not) Reading Signs5. The Art of MisreadingRereading The Love of a Good Woman (1998), Catherine Sheldrick Ross1. Introduction: ‘An Extra Dimension to Life’2. ‘The Love of a Good Woman’: ‘The Book Had Just Shifted This Much’3. ‘Jakarta’: ‘A Place of Their Own’4. ‘Cortes Island’: Sources and Transformations5. What Ordinary Readers Say about Reading The Love of a Good WomanWorks ConsultedIndexContributor BiographiesAcknowledgements