| When questioned by interviewers about matters of craft, Alice Munro is usually vague in her responses, once insisting that she has "no idea how to write a story" (The Globe and Mail E. 1). Her reluctance to make any statements about the theory behind her writing forces readers and scholars to look to Munro's fiction for answers. The frequent appearance of female artist figures in her stories, and the concern of these characters with practical and theoretical issues related to writing suggests that Munro is allowing her work to speak for itself. The primary objective of this thesis is to explore Alice Munro's fictional aesthetic and to delineate its components through specific reference to the stories themselves.;The stories examined in chapters three through five are arranged in a chronological format, from a sampling of early published stories to the most recent collections, and either feature female writers or deal with matters associated with writing. Chapter two is devoted entirely to a study of Munro's only attempt at the novel form, Lives of Girls and Women. (Abstract shortened by UMI.). |
