Alice Munro

Alice Munro (born Alice Ann Laidlaw on July 10, 1931) is a Canadian short story writer, widely considered one of the greatest short story writers in modern literature.

Writing style

Many of Munro's stories are set in Huron County, Ontario. Her strong regional focus is one of the features of her fiction. Another is the all-knowing narrator who serves to make sense of the world. Many compare Munro's small town settings to American writers of the rural South. As in the writing of William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor, her characters often confront deep-rooted customs and traditions. However, the reaction of Munro's characters is less intense than their southern counterparts. Thus, particularly with respect to her male characters, she may be said to capture the essense of everyman. Her female characters, though, are more complex. Much of Munro's work exemplifies the literary genre known as Southern Ontario Gothic.

Related Topics:
Huron County, Ontario - Rural South - William Faulkner - Flannery O'Connor - Everyman - Southern Ontario Gothic

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A frequent theme of her work is the dilemmas of a girl coming of age and coming to terms with her family and the small town she grew up in. In recent work she has shifted her focus to the travails of middle age, of women alone and of the elderly. It is a mark of her style for characters to experience a revelation that sheds light on, and gives meaning to, an event.

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Munro's spare and lucid language and command of detail gives her fiction a "remarkable precision," as Helen Hoy observes. Munro's prose reveals the ambiguities of life: "ironic and serious at the same time," "mottoes of godliness and honor and flaming bigotry," "special, useless knowledge," "tones of shrill and happy outrage," "the bad taste, the heartlessness, the joy of it." Her style places the fantastic next to the ordinary with each undercutting the other in ways that simply, and effortlessly, evoke life.http://www.lib.unb.ca/Texts/SCL/bin/get.cgi?directory=vol5_1/&filename=hoy.htm As Thacker (1998) notes:

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Munro's writing creates what amounts almost to an empathetic union among readers, critics most apparent among them. We are drawn to her writing by its verisimilitude—not of mimesis, so-called and... 'realism'—but rather the feeling of being itself... of just being a human being http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3683/is_199807/ai_n8800214

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