The awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to the Canadian writer Alice Munro in 2013 confirmed her position as a master of the short story form. This book explores Munro's work from a full range of critical perspectives, focussing on three of her most popular and important published collections: Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001), Runaway (2004), and her final collection Dear Life (2012). With chapters written by the world's leading critics of Munro's work, the short story form and contemporary Canadian writing, this book explores such themes as love and marriage, sex, fate, gender and humor in her writings as well as her approaches to narrative form and autobiography. In these three late collections Munro sharply articulates, again and again, the mysteries of being itself.

In Reading Alice Munro, 1973-2013, the world's leading Munro scholar offers a critical overview of Alice Munro and her writing spanning forty years. Beginning with a newly written overarching introduction, featuring directive interleaved commentaries addressing chronology and contexts, ending with encompassing afterword, this collection provides a selection of essays and reviews that reflect their times and tell the story of Munro's emergence and recognition as an internationally acclaimed writer since the 1970s. Acknowledging her beginnings and her persistence as a writer of increasingly exceptional short stories, and just short stories, it treats her career through Thacker's criticism up to her fourteenth collection, Dear Life (2012), and to the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature. Altogether, this book encompasses the whole trajectory of Munro's critical presence while offering a singularly informed retrospective perspective.

Willa Cather at the Modernist Crux examines Willa Cather's position in time, in aesthetics, and in the world. Born a Victorian in 1873, Cather made herself a modernist through the poems, stories, and novels she wrote and published into the twentieth century. Beginning with a prologue locating Cather's position, this volume of Cather Studies offers three sets of related essays. The first section takes up Cather's beginnings with her late nineteenth-century cultural influences. The second section explores a range of discernible direct connections with contemporary artists (Howard Pyle, Frederic Remington, and Ernest Blumenschein) and others who figured in the making of her texts. The third section focuses on The Song of the Lark, a novel that confirms Cather's shift westward and elaborates her emergent modernism. An epilogue by the editors of The Selected Letters of Willa Cather addresses how the recent availability of these letters has transformed Cather studies. Altogether, these essays detail Cather's shaping of the world of the early twentieth century and later into a singular modernism born of both inherited and newer cultural traditions.

"The essays in Cather Studies, Volume 8 explore the many locales and cultures informing Willa Cather's fiction. A lifelong Francophile, Cather first visited France in 1902 and returned repeatedly throughout her life. Her visits to France influenced not only her writing but also her interpretation of other worlds; for example, while visiting the American Southwest in 1912, a region that informed her subsequent works, she first viewed that landscape through the prism of her memories of Provence. Cather's intellectual intercourse between the Old and the New World was a two-way street, moving both people and cultural mores between the two. But her worlds extended far beyond France, or even geographical locations. This new volume pairs Cather innovatively with additional influences---theological, aesthetic, even gastronomical---and examines her as tourist and traveler cautiously yet assiduoulsy exploring a diverse range of palces, ethnicities, and professions."--BOOK JACKET.

What comes to mind when we think of the Old West? Often, our conceptions are accompanied by as much mythology and mystique as fact or truth. What are the differences in how the Canadian and American Wests are perceived? Did they develop differently or are they just perceived differently? How do our conceptions influence our perceptions? A companion volume to One West, Two Myths: A Comparative Reader, One West, Two Myths II: Essays on Comparison presents scholarly views on the comparison of the Canadian and American Wests and the various methodologies involved. Contributors include literature specialists, scholars of popular culture, art historians, and political, social, and intellectual historians, demonstrating the interdisciplinary nature of this area of study. With Contributions By: J.M.S. Careless Sarah Carter Brian W. Dippie R. Douglas Francis C.L. Higham William H. Katerberg Lee Clark Mitchell Roger L. Nichols Robert Thacker Fredrick Jackson Turner Aritha van Herk David L. Williams

Focusing on Alice Munro’s last three collections, this book examines the differences between these volumes and the rest of her work to analyse the emergence and the difference of her 'late style'. Alice Munro has effectively reshaped the short story as a form. This book focuses on Munro’s art of recursion - an approach that has been evident throughout her career but came to the fore in her last three books, The View from Castle Rock (2006), Too Much Happiness (2009) and, especially, Dear Life (2012). This recursion and return manifest themselves not only in Munro's return to previously published pieces, but also to her discovery and meditations on her Scottish heritage, which can be read as entrance to her own understanding of herself and her life. Its provenance, displayed through archival evidence, is complex yet reveals a writer intent on a precise late style. Munro's final works serve as a coda to both her late style and to her entire career as arguably one of the finest short story writers ever to put pen to paper.

What comes to mind when we think of the Old West? Often, our conceptions are accompanied by as much mythology and mystique as fact or truth. What are the differences in how the Canadian and American Wests are perceived? Did they develop differently or are they just perceived differently? How do our conceptions influence our perceptions? This reader explores the problems, importance, and results of comparing the Canadian and American Wests, critically examining how we conceptualize the history and development of the West and how that influences our perceptions. One West, Two Myths II: Essays on Comparison is an excellent introduction to this burgeoning area of study as it endeavours to engage the imaginations of those who are new to the subject. With Contributions By: Gerald Friesen C.L. Higham Michel Hogue Beth LaDow Sheila McManus Peter S. Morris Molly P. Rozum Elliott West Donald Worster

Cather Studies 4 contains eighteen essays and elaborates a theme, Willa Cather s Canadian and Old World Connections. Such connections are central to Cather s art and artistry. She transported much from the Old World to the New, shaping her antecedents to tell, in new ways, the stories of Nebraska, of the American Southwest, and especially of Quebec, in Shadows on the Rock. David Stouck details Cather s numerous Canadian connections, Richard Millington treats her anthropological re-creation of the cultural moment of seventeenth-century Quebec, and Francois Palleau-Papin finds The Hidden French in Cather s English. A volume of lively and informed criticism, Cather Studies 4 vividly demonstrates Cather s artistry and her work s deep connections to the present cultural and critical moment. Robert Thacker is the director of the Canadian studies program at St. Lawrence University and the author of English-Canadian Literature. Michael A. Peterman is chair of the English Department at Trent University. His works include I Bless You in My Heart.

S. S. McClure was one of America's greatest editors and publishers in the lively era of muckraking reform. He is remembered for "McClure's Magazine," which early in the twentieth century published the works of famous authors and social reformers. He was also the mentor of young Willa Cather. After leaving her position at "McClure's" in 1912, Cather ghosted this graceful portrait of her former boss. Cather's developing style is clear throughout "The Autobiography of S. S. McClure." She goes far inside her subject to find his voice and catch the rhythms of his exciting life: his immigration from Ireland to America, his Horatio Alger-like rise from poverty and struggle to success. Cather shows the risks he took in forming the first newspaper syndicate in the United States, which gave him access to such literary masters as Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, and Robert Louis Stevenson. His extensive contacts were advantageous later in establishing McClure's, the medium for muckrakers like Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens. These famous figures, and many others, enter into "The Autobiography of S. S. McClure," which was originally published in 1914, just as Cather was launching her own illustrious career as a novelist

Before Willa Cather turned primarily to the fiction that made her reputation, she produced striking poems that were collected in April Twilights. It was her literary debut, preceding the publication of O Pioneers! by nine years. In her introduction distinguished Cather scholar Bernice Slote notes that this edition of April Twilights restores what had been "an almost lost, certainly blurred, portion of the creative life of a great novelist." Among the thirty-seven selections are the much-anthologized "Grandmither, Think Not I Forget" and the highly evocative "Prairie Dawn." This printing includes a new introduction by Robert Thacker that provides new insights into Cather and her poetry.