This introduction takes up and uses two salient moments in Alice Munro’s career to bookend her aesthetic and technical accomplishments in the four collections treated here. The Moons of Jupiter (1982), as Lorrie Moore has argued, revealed Munro’s radical complexity emergent; after the four middle-style books here analysed, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001) took her into a late style. This essay briefly treats the bases of Munro’s artistic trajectory by detailing the biographical, textual, and developmental contexts of the four breakthrough books examined here, collections which confirm an ever-deepening artistry between 1986 and 1998. As such this introduction permits reflection on the short story as practised by Alice Munro, along with other key topics such as her life and biography, oeuvre, career and colleagues and the insights into Munro’s work and career by her fellow short story writer Lorrie Moore.

This article begins by revisiting a conversation I had with Alice Munro in 1987 in which she named her favorite story by Willa Cather, “Old Mrs. Harris” (1932). After that conversation I went on to analyze Cather’s influence on Munro in her own story, “Dulse” (1980)—where Cather is in effect a character—in my article “Alice Munro’s Willa Cather” (1992). But until now I have not pursued the structural symmetry mentioned in passing there between “Old Mrs. Harris” and Munro’s “The Progress of Love” (1985), the title story of her sixth collection. This article does that, treating the three women in each story—grandmother, daughter, granddaughter—through both their autobiographical underpinnings and the narrative wisdom each story ultimately yields. This comparison is an instance of direct influence, of one great writer modeling for another.

Focusing on Alice Munro’s last three books, 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 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.

"Katherine Ann Roberts. West / Border / Road: Nation and Genre in the Contemporary Canadian Narrative." University of Toronto Quarterly, 89(3), pp. 611–612

Reviewed by: The Little Art Colony and US Modernism: Carmel, Provincetown, Taos by Geneva M. Gano Robert Thacker Geneva M. Gano, The Little Art Colony and US Modernism: Carmel, Provincetown, Taos. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2020. 296 pp. Hardcover, $105; e-book, $105. Toward the end of "Tom Outland's Story," the second book in Willa Cather's The Professor's House (1925), Outland and Roddy Blake argue over Blake's sale, to a German collector, of the Native American "relics" they had together discovered on the Blue Mesa. Blake made the sale without Outland's knowledge, while the latter was away in Washington trying, unsuccessfully, to interest officials at the Smithsonian in them. They argue, Blake leaves Outland alone on the mesa, and he is never seen again despite Tom's persistent search efforts. Before he goes, Blake says that he assumed that Outland "meant to 'realize'" on the relics "and that it would all come to money in the end. 'Everything does,' he added" (243). Just as she was reading proofs of that novel during the summer of 1925, Cather, along with her creative life partner, Edith Lewis, visited Mabel Dodge Luhan, the driving force behind the little art colony at Taos at her ranch there; they stayed for two weeks, working and also visiting their friends D. H. Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, who were living at a nearby ranch through Luhan's auspices. Among the long list of modernist artists Luhan—whom Cather knew from Greenwich Village—attracted to the Taos colony, Lawrence and Cather were among the most prominent. The wealthy Luhan used her money to make the colony happen and so in large measure made Taos. Money and little art colonies. Arguing that the little art colony "has been largely overlooked as an important geosocial formation" (9) within modernist studies, Geneva M. Gano here offers a sustained recompense for this absence with this excellent book. In numerous grounded, deeply contextualized, and theoretically informed ways, she emphasizes "the historical contingency and geographical specificity of modernist praxis as it emerged in place" (21). Setting her three little art colonies [End Page 185] in context, Gano ever keeps in mind the overweening presences of what she calls "the world-system's metropolitan cores": places such as Berlin, Paris, London, New York City, and others that have "long attracted the lion's share of scholarly attention" in modernist studies and "have sometimes been deployed synecdochally as representative of putatively national modernisms" (19). Instead, Gano sets out to treat the little art colony "as a semiperipheral space within the nation" (20). She succeeds admirably. Treating each of the little art colonies in succession, Gano begins with Carmel-by-the-Sea, where early in the twentieth century such figures as Mary Austin, Langston Hughes, Robinson Jeffers, and Jack London were drawn. She pays especial attention to London, and to his novel The Valley of the Moon (1913) because in it "the village clearly is a playground for bohemian leisure, not a site for settling down and making good"—a view of Carmel already found "in promotional materials for the region—but [London's] work was seminal in transmitting the 'Carmel idea' to a broader public" (45). Gano cites the painter Ferdinand Burgdorff saying, "'It was not the waves, the rocks or the trees that attracted tourists to Carmel,' it was the artists" (47). For his part, Jeffers's "long and productive career would be grounded in his close, personal identification with the Monterey Bay Peninsula and his characteristic representation of it in his poetry" (58). With only a few exceptions, his poems "were set in the recognisable landscape of Big Sur and contributed to the art colony's collective work of placemaking" (83). "His poems shattered the carefully crafted image of Carmel as a site of exclusive leisure, pleasure and unmarred natural beauty, a move that jeopardised the livelihood of all of the art colonists who depended on it" (84). Gano treats each colony as a singularity; understood now, each contributes to a larger modernist sense. After Carmel she heads east to Provincetown and, with great detail and persuasive force, accounts for the colony's key role both in the career...

Beginning in the mid-1980s, Alice Munro drew attention in interviews to her rapt admiration for the work of William Maxwell, a writer she has called “my favorite writer in the world.” The two were not close, although they met a few times through their shared association with the New Yorker. In 1988 Munro published an appreciation of Maxwell’s work and, after his death in 2000, agreed to revise it for a tribute volume published in 2004. During those years too, Munro was at work on a family volume she had long contemplated, The View from Castle Rock (2006), one that was inspired in part by and modelled on Maxwell’s Ancestors: A Family History (1971). This article examines the Maxwell-Munro crux as an example of the dynamics of authorship; it is an important example of two compatible writers who, throughout their careers, created narrative rooted in the very stuff of their own experience in place and time—whether seen as fiction, autobiography, or memoir. Each did so in ways that accentuate, for the critic intent on analysing authorship, the play of the past in shaping of any narrative.

While scholarship focused on Alice Munro’s fiction has been an ongoing feature of Canadian literature since the early 1980s (the first analogous volume to this one was Probable Fictions [1983]), an...

"The Cambridge Companion to Alice Munro edited by David Staines." University of Toronto Quarterly, 87(3), pp. 386–387