Space and Place in Alice Munro's Fiction

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 McGill, 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.