Southern Ontario Gothic Features Of Alice Munro’s Writing

Alice Munro, winner of2013Nobel Prize in Literature Prize, is a famous Canadian short story writer, She is also winner of the Man Booker International Prize in2009, three times Canada’s highest prize in literature, Governor General’s Literary Award, and tons of other awards and honors from English Speaking Countries. In her60years’ writing career, she has contributed13short story collections and one novel to the world literature.One of Munro’s extraordinary features is the special setting she uses for her stories, Southern Ontario of Canada, her hometown. She has impressive ability to capture her hometown people’s everyday, ordinary life. Her excellent Gothic writing style of placing ordinary people in extraordinary circumstance has won her the honor of writer of Southern Ontario Gothic, a genre that features decay, haunting fear and anxiety, mental illness, hypocrisies of small protestant communities, and elements of the supernatural in the Southern Ontario context.Munro studies are scarce in China and still inadequate in the world. Among the limited studies that have been conducted on Munro’s works, there is little systematic study of her Southern Ontario Gothic writing style. And this is precisely the focus of the present study.This thesis uses traditional Gothic analysis methodology to analyze Munro’s stories text and find out features of Munro’s Southern Ontario Gothic writing as these:firstly, she sets most of her stories text in her Gothic hometown in Southern Ontario; secondly, her Gothic fear is based on nothing but the truth; thirdly, Gothic terrors for the everyday and ordinary life of her hometown people are from anxiety of survival, the haunted death, the fatal illness, the old age, the fantasy and secrets hidden in people’s deep mind; fourthly, her using typical devices for Gothic plot, such as the Gothic beginnings, open or surprise endings, letters and dreams to have Gothic tension. The fifth feature is her mostly using female narrators and with the female’s perspective. The themes she reveals from her Southern Ontario Gothic writing are violent nature of human beings, the helpless situation of children and miserable existence of women.