Overview
- Updates and expands the scholarly examinations of Alice Munro’s work
- Contributes to the study of affect theory and literary ethics as well as age and disability
- Challenges perceptions and assessments of Alice Munro
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism (PSATLC)
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Table of contents (11 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
Ethics and Affects in the Fiction of Alice Munro explores the representation of embodied ethics and affects in Alice Munro’s writing. The collection illustrates how Munro’s short stories powerfully intersect with important theoretical trends in literary studies, including affect studies, ethical criticism, age studies, disability studies, animal studies, and posthumanism. These essays offer us an Alice Munro who is not the kindly Canadian icon reinforcing small-town verities who was celebrated and perpetuated in acts of national pedagogy with her Nobel Prize win; they ponder, instead, an edgier, messier Munro whose fictions of affective and ethical perplexities disturb rather than comfort. In Munro’s fiction, unruly embodiments and affects interfere with normative identity and humanist conventions of the human based on reason and rationality, destabilizing prevailing gender and sexual politics, ethical responsibilities, and affective economies. As these essays make clear, Munro’s fiction reminds us of the consequences of everyday affects and the extraordinary ordinariness of the ethical encounters we engage again and again.
Reviews
“Shame, guilt, envy, disgust and other negative affects recur in the stories of Alice Munro, who explores insoluble moral dilemmas with deep compassion. In this groundbreaking collection, ten scholars respond with an answering compassion, paying close attention to those conflicts that relate to embodied female subjectivity. Focusing on a range of topics, from breastfeeding to murder, these essays shed new light on ancient human questions.” (Magdalene Redekop, Professor Emeritus of English, University of Toronto, Canada, and author of Mothers and Other Clowns: The Stories of Alice Munro, 1992)
Editors and Affiliations
About the editors
Amelia DeFalco is University Academic Fellow in Medical Humanities in the School of English, University of Leeds, UK. She is the author of Uncanny Subjects: Aging in Contemporary Narrative (2010) and Imagining Care: Responsibility, Dependency, and Canadian Literature (2016).
Lorraine York is Distinguished University Professor and Senator William McMaster Chair in Canadian Literature and Culture in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, Canada. Recent books include Margaret Atwood and the Labour of Literary Celebrity (2013), and Reluctant Celebrity (Palgrave Macmillan 2018).
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Ethics and Affects in the Fiction of Alice Munro
Editors: Amelia DeFalco, Lorraine York
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90644-7
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-90643-0Published: 13 September 2018
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-08063-1Published: 03 January 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-90644-7Published: 03 September 2018
Series ISSN: 2634-6311
Series E-ISSN: 2634-632X
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIII, 250
Topics: Literary Theory, Contemporary Literature, North American Literature