The Village Landscapes In Alice Munro's Dear Life

Alice Munro(1931-),a famous short story Canadian writer,won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013.After the short story collection Dear Life was published in 2012,it became the concern of many scholars and won the Trillium Book Award,Ontario's top literary prize.This thesis finds that there are a lot of landscapes in Dear Life,and they can be divided into two categories – natural landscapes and cultural landscapes.The natural landscapes include water such as rivers and lakes,animals such as bear,wolf,bird,skunk,and cow,and plants such as trees and flowers.The cultural landscapes include dwellings,religions,and schools.Previous researches mainly focused on the collection's rich themes and Munro's unique narrative styles.And landscapes have seldom drawn their deserved critical attention.Therefore,this thesis tries to use Mike Crang's theory of cultural geography to analyze the collection from the perspective of natural landscapes and cultural landscapes.Crang's cultural geography tries to study culture from the perspective of geography.“Landscapes” are a concept of geography.Relevant views of literary geographic landscapes put forward that literary landscapes offer some kind of emotional echoes for the objective geography.These landscapes are endowed with spiritual meaning and emotional connotation,and express insight into society and life.This thesis analyzes natural landscapes and cultural landscapes in Dear Life,reflecting Canada's ecological consciousness and inclusiveness.And it tries to explore the relationship between natural and cultural geographic environment in Munro's hometown Wingham and natural and cultural landscapes in the collection,and find out Munro's hometown has a huge impact on her.Wingham's natural and cultural landscapes penetrate into Munro's mind day after day,and finally they internalize and form intrinsic and unique geographic environment in Munro's heart.When Munro creates her work,these internalized landscapes appear in her work,reflecting her strong feeling toward hometown.However,some landscapes in Dear Life are more than the reality in Wingham.Munro tries to put the landscapes such as some animals,plants,religions,schools and so on in Canada but not in Wingham into the fictional small town in her collection,reflecting Munro's concern to Canadian nature,and her agreement to religious pluralism and multi-culture in Canada.