Abstract
Munro’s narratives are characteristically intense and condensed character studies, intimate and psychological portraits of women and men, frequently embedded in the dynamic clash between individualism (e.g. figures of outsiders) and community (family, small town setting, etc.). Arguably Munro dedicates the form of her stories to their content, referencing in different works similar narrative patterns and tropes, for instance the theme of home-coming, and the tension arising from contrasting lifestyles (modern and “urban” vs. “rural” and narrowed-minded). She constructs her characters’ identities by interweaving images of past and present in multi-layered narratives of individual memory. In this chapter Jędrzej Burszta analyzes several short stories (grouped together according to their themes), while focusing in particular on the three-story cycle in her 2004 collection Runaway (“Chance,” “Soon” and “Silence”), a psychological study of the character of Juliet carried out over a number of years, in which the writer deals with many themes that have been reoccurring in her work since the publication of her debut collection.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
As W.R. Martin acknowledges in his analysis of the novel, and as other scholars have written about more extensively (e.g. Moss, 1977, pp. 54–68; Rasporich, 1990, pp. 32–88), sexuality is a central theme for Alice Munro, particularly the young heroines’ first sexual experiences. This theme, however, in many ways crucial for reading Munro’s fictions, is only signaled here, and will not be further addressed in this essay.
References
Bowering, G. (1979/1980). Modernism could not last forever. Canadian Fiction Magazine, 32/33, 4–9.
Hopper, B. (2008). The fiction of Alice Munro. An appreciation. Westpoint, CT: Praeger Publishers.
Howells, C. A. (1998). Alice Munro. New York, NY: Manchester University Press.
Martin, W. R. (1987). Alice Munro: Paradox and parallel. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press.
McCaig, J. A. (2002). Reading in: Alice Munro’s archives. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
Moss, J. (1977). Alice in the looking glass: Munro’s lives of girls and women. In J. Moss (Ed.), Sex and violence in the Canadian novel: The ancestral present (pp. 54–86). Toronto, Canada: McClelland and Stewart.
Munro, A. (1979). The beggar maid: Stories of Flo and Rose. New York, NY: Knopf.
Munro, A. (1983). Lives of girls and women. New York, NY: New American Library.
Munro, A. (2004). Runaway. New York, NY: Random House Large Print.
Murphy, G. (2009). The art of Alice Munro: Memory, identity, and the aesthetic of connection. In H. Bloom (Ed.), Alice Munro (pp. 41–56). New York, NY: Infobase Publishing.
Rasporich, B. J. (1990). Dance of the sexes: Art and gender in the fiction of Alice Munro. Edmonton, AB: University of Alberta Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Burszta, J. (2016). Images of Past and Present: Memory and Identity in Alice Munro’s Short-Story Cycles. In: Buchholtz, M. (eds) Alice Munro. Second Language Learning and Teaching(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24061-9_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24061-9_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-24059-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-24061-9
eBook Packages: EducationEducation (R0)