Christine Lorre-Johnston & Eleonora Rao 
Space and Place in Alice Munro’s Fiction [PDF ebook] 
A Book with Maps in It

New essays engaging with the developing field of literary geography to devote attention to the ‘regional’ settings of Munro’s stories and how they affect her characters’ development or stasis.






Alice Munro, the 2013 Nobel Prize laureate in Literature, has revolutionized the architecture of the short story. This collection of essays on Munro engages with literary geography, an emergent interdisciplinary field that is located at the interface between human geography and literary studies and is one of the most salient manifestations of the ongoing spatial turn in the arts and humanities.

Critical readings of Munro’s stories have labeled her literary production ‘regional, ‘ since she sets the majority of her short stories in the area of rural Ontario where she grew up. Until now, however, little attention has been devoted to the role of that location in the stories and tothe way that particular setting interacts with her characters’ development or stasis. This collection contains eleven essays organized in two parts: first, Conceptualizing Space and Place: Houses, Landscapes, Territory; and second, Close Readings of Space and Place.


Contributors: Corinne Bigot, Lynn Blin, Giuseppina Botta, Fausto Ciompi, Ailsa Cox, Christine Lorre-Johnston, Robert Mc Gill, Claire Omhovère, Anca-Raluca Radu, Eleonora Rao, Caterina Ricciardi.


Christine Lorre-Johnston is a senior lecturer in English at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. Eleonora Rao teaches English and American literatures at the University of Salerno.

Table des matières

Introduction – Christine Lorre-Johnston and Eleonora Rao

Where Do You Think You Are? Alice Munro’s Open Houses – Robert Mc Gill

‘Whose House Is That?’ Spaces of Metamorphosis in Alice Munro’s
Dance of the Happy Shades,
Who Do You Think You Are?, and
The View from Castle Rock – Eleonora Rao

Mapping the Vernacular Landscape in Alice Munro’s ‘What Do You Want to Know For?’ and Other Stories – Corinne Bigot

Stories in the Landscape Mode: A Reading of Alice Munro’s ‘Lives of Girls and Women, ‘ ‘Walker Brothers Cowboy, ‘ and ‘Lichen’ – Claire Omhovère

‘What Place Is This?’ Alice Munro’s Fictional Places and Her Place in Fiction – Anca-Raluca Radu

‘The Emptiness in Place of Her’: Space, Absence, and Memory in Alice Munro’s
Dear Life – Ailsa Cox

Down the Rabbit Hole: Revisiting the Topos of the Cave in Alice Munro’s Short Stories – Christine Lorre-Johnston

Spaces of Utopia and Spaces of Actuality in Alice Munro’s ‘Jakarta’ – Fausto Ciompi

Spatial Perspectives in Alice Munro’s ‘Passion’ – Giuseppina Botta

Charting Alice Munro’s
Terra Incognita: Punctuated Space in ‘Free Radicals’ – Lynn Blin

Heterotopy in Alice Munro’s ‘In Sight of the Lake’ – Caterina Ricciardi