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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.Anyone intrigued at the prospect of learning much more about Alice Munro as an individual writer and person and about the fascinating process of writing, editing, and rewriting could not find a better researched or more engaging guide and inspiration than Robert Thacker’s <i>Alice Munro’s Late Style</i>.
J.R. (Tim) Struthers, editor of the companion volumes Alice Munro Country and Alice Munro Everlasting
Focusing on Alice Munro’s last three collections, this book examines the differences between these volumes and the rest of her work to analyse the emergence and the difference of her 'late style'.
Alice Munro has effectively reshaped the short story as a form. This book focuses on Munro’s art of recursion - an approach that has been evident throughout her career but came to the fore in her last three books, The View from Castle Rock (2006), Too Much Happiness (2009) and, especially, Dear Life (2012). This recursion and return manifest themselves not only in Munro's return to previously published pieces, but also to her discovery and meditations on her Scottish heritage, which can be read as entrance to her own understanding of herself and her life. Its provenance, displayed through archival evidence, is complex yet reveals a writer intent on a precise late style.
Munro's final works serve as a coda to both her late style and to her entire career as arguably one of the finest short story writers ever to put pen to paper.
Preface: “I want to do this with honour, if I possible can”
Introduction: Of Late Styles and Alice Munro
Chapter One: “maybe I can do something unexpected with it”: Imagining The View from Castle Rock
Chapter Two: “it is difficult to decide what works in a book of this sort”: The Making of The View from Castle Rock
Chapter Three: “It has some real Munrovian highlights”: “The View from Castle Rock” and The View from Castle Rock
Chapter Four: “and then another little story comes along and that solves how life has got to be”: The Recursions of Too Much Happiness
Chapter Five: “it seemed as if we had gotten time back, as if there was all the time in the world”: The Gathering of Stories Before the “Finale” to Dear Life
Chapter Six: “Simple Truth”: “Too Much Happiness” and the “Finale” to Dear Life
Epilogue: “to have got my chance to do it, as well as I could”: Alice Munro Finis
Index