Description

A master of the short story genre, Alice Munro is also a literary stylist, which
her debut collection, Dance of the Happy Shades, amply demonstrates. Her
typical setting is her native southwestern Ontario, yet her stories are anything
but prosaic. Munro has been said to defamiliarize the familiar ; she
reveals the dazzle of outdoors but through the lightning cracks in the drawn-down
blinds, also conjures up shadows, disquieting figures, or Gothic
mother figures. She probes into patterns of exclusion or intrusion, and often
conveys a sense of entrapment. Yet her text exudes a paradoxical sense of
freedom as she makes the art of the short story her own. Writing from
within, straying from dramatic descriptions, she depicts a landscape which is
part sunlight, part shadows, and is always a mindscape. She describes lives of
girls and women, exploring the haunting tensions between mothers and
daughters, negotiating boundaries. Playing on intertextual scraps which she
sews into the fabric of her stories, she seeks to reveal life's little ironies.